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THE REASONABLENESS OF 
THE RELIGION OF JESUS 

BY WILLIAM STEPHEN RAINSFORD 



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THE REASONABLENESS 
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS 



THE REASONABLENESS 
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS 



BY 



WILLIAM STEPHEN RAINSFORD, D.D. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

@fre ftitoer?ibe $«?£ Cambridge 

1913 



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COPYRIGHT, I913, BY WILLIAM STEPHEN RAINSFORD 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published February /g/3 



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©CI.A332630 



NOTE 



The substance of this volume was first used 
as the Baldwin Lectures for 1911 at the Uni- 
versity of Michigan, under the Baldwin Lec- 
tureship for the Establishment and Defense 
of Christian Truth. 



CONTENTS 

Introduction ix 

I. The Reasonableness and Necessity of 

Growth and Change in Religion . 3 

II. Jesus' Doctrine of the Seed : the Method 

of Growth and Change .... 33 

III. Jesus' Doctrine of the Seed — Continued 76 

IV. The Naturalness and Supernaturalness 

of Jesus 114 

V. Jesus' Doctrine 162 

VI. Jesus' Doctrine of Man's Approach to 

God 204 



INTRODUCTION 

I had the honor of knowing Mr. Baldwin, the 
founder of this lectureship. The first object 
he had in mind was to aid the religious life 
of the students of this university ; and it is 
because I hope to be of some small service to 
you, young men and women, and not because 
I have any hope of adding a worthy volume 
to the valuable apologetic library which this 
lectureship is, I doubt not, destined in time 
to produce, that I, with much hesitation, ven- 
tured to accept the nomination that the Bishop 
of the diocese did me the honor to make. 

I never was a scholar. I have read some- 
what widely. I have seen more of the world, 
and of the men and women in it, than most 
clergymen. But such powers of memory as I 
possessed, always poor, have suffered greatly 
in latter years, owing to excessive strain and 
ill health. Thus you see I am unusually poorly 



x INTRODUCTION 

furnished to fill the office of a "learned" 
lecturer. 

Why, then, do I accept? I do so because, 
while I have no capacity to aid the scholar, 
I hope still to be of some service to those 
who, as they are entering on life's more 
thoughtful stage, find, as I did myself many 
years ago, the foundations on which youth's 
rather light-hearted religious structure had 
been hastily builded, crumbling away beneath 
their feet. The clearest-eyed among us sees 
but dimly through life's dark glasses ; but 
dim as these eyes must be, to those who stead- 
ily seek for light, gleams do now and then 
break through upon our stormy sea. Moments 
of what we must deem u insight " are given 
us, when all things around and within us are 
less opaque. When we travellers, stumbling 
along life's hard pathway, are sure that we 
see a light, — no wide-shining illumination, 
no Bethlehem star even, once again with steady 
ray pointing to the manger where wisdom 
learned to worship babyhood, but still a light 
wide enough and clear enough to help us to 



INTRODUCTION xi 

order our steps aright — when such visitations 
come true, then do we rise and gird up our 
loins. New hope, and purpose, and courage, 
are ours. We speak to our fellow travellers 
to cheer them, or we even sing, as I have 
heard tired soldiers sing, as they made long 
march in the night. 

Well, not to wander too aimlessly and too 
long, I have had such experiences. I have 
seen the " gleam " and stumblingly have 
tried to rise and. follow it, and of such times 
and efforts I have tried to find some record. 
I will try to recall what I saw and felt, in the 
hope that it may be of some service to you, 
who soon are setting out on the larger, freer 
life awaiting those whose college days are over. 

In my lectures to you I purpose going over 
old ground. Dealing with old questions which 
are ever the newest questions of all, — ques- 
tions that down here, in the shadows and 
mists of this world life, can never receive a 
full or satisfactory answer. Yet since each 
man and woman of us all must, in his heart- 
of hearts, make some sort of tentative answer 



xii INTRODUCTION 

to them, must give some reason to his own 
soul for the faith or non-faith that is in him, I 
venture to offer you the poor best that is mine. 

I was brought up to believe that on those 
tremendous doctrines which are commonly 
known as the fundamentals of our religion, 
all should entertain a certainty, should at 
least rejoice in a " sure and certain hope." I 
cannot claim to have won any such faith. 
Such hope as I have is far removed from cer- 
tainty. Nor do I find, among my fellow pil- 
grims of the road, that their assurances are 
generally of a higher order than my own. 

When we can succeed in breaking through 
those conventions that so effectively muffle 
the voices of our hearts, when we try to say 
to each other what we really feel, — really 
mean, — at such times Emerson's statement 
of our human limitations fits us one and all : — 



He by false usage pinned about 
No breath within, no passage out, 

Cast wishful glances at the stars, 

And wishful saw the ocean stream : — 



INTRODUCTION jriii 

" Merge me in the brute universe, 
Or lift to a diviner dream ! " 

The divine within us makes surrender to 
the brute an ultimate torture. The brute 
within us plucks the pinion feather from our 
souls' wings as they seek to bear us above the 
steaming flats and valleys of sense. 

Sometimes we are sure our feet are on the 
king's highway, and the first thing we know 
we find ourselves fast by the heels in Doubt- 
ing Castle, and all view of the Delectable 
Mountains by the dark enclosing walls cut 
off. 

Such is the experience of the majority of 
men who are thoughtful, and who try to do 
right. Such has been my experience, at any 
rate, and as I speak to you, I shall at least 
try not to profess an order of faith I do not 
enjoy, or an assurance I do not possess. I 
shall try to say what I feel and believe, and no 
more. For I have noticed that few things are 
more hurtful to the cause of real religion to- 
day than the habit of exaggeration into which 
good people sometimes fall as they seek to aid 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

the faith of others by grossly overstating 
their own. 

When circumstances arose which made the 
apostles of old look fearfully toward an un- 
certain and dangerous future, their spokesman 
cried, "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou 
hast the words of eternal life." Sure it is 
that the intervening ages have given no re- 
sponse to that query — if Jesus cannot help 
us, no one else can. It is a matter of history 
that Jesus did most wonderfully inspire those 
men. It is a matter of fact that he can and 
does comfort, guide, and inspire those who 
seek him to-day. Of this much I am sure. I 
believe it with all my heart. I have seen it 
proved, again and again, in the lives of many 
people I have been privileged to know inti- 
mately. 

So I beg you to come with me and see if 
duty's path may not grow plainer to you, and 
your life's burden lighter, as you try to set 
your will to understand and accept his reason- 
able service. 

W. S. Rainsford. 



THE REASONABLENESS 
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS 



THE REASONABLENESS 
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS 



THE REASONABLENESS AND NECESSITY OF 
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN RELIGION 

In ray trouble I have prepared for the house of the Lord an 
hundred thousand talents of gold ; . . . thou mayest add thereto. 
— 1 Chron. xxn, 14. 

David is delivering his dying charge to Sol- 
omon his son. David may be considered the 
founder of the Israelitish kingdom. Perhaps 
it is no unfair historic analogy to call him the 
King Alfred of the Jews. The qualities that 
have gone to make that imperishable race 
great were embodied in David, its first great 
king. Great were David's services to the weak 
people he championed and led. It is not too 
much to say that, if he did not make them a 
nation, he saved the nation from merging, 
being lost, in the surrounding and conflicting 
tribes. By constant warfare he won them free- 



4 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

dom from enemies — and forced on them a 
national unity. The extraordinary and unique 
religious genius of that people found in David 
one of its earliest and best expressions. With 
him the richest religious poetry our race has 
produced began to assume those forms which 
in the Psalms are immortal. He must have 
sung some of the first great religious Jewish 
songs, and though we are unable positively to 
ascribe to him any of the Psalms as we now 
have them, we yet know that his commanding 
personality had so stamped itself on the poetic 
literature of the race that in after times it was 
natural to ascribe to the warrior-poet the best 
of them all. 

The true poet of an epoch feels and is swayed 
by the passions of his time. Those times were 
cruel ; there was little pity shown from man to 
man. Men were lustful and unscrupulous, and 
often cruel, lustful, and unscrupulous was 
David the king. Yet, in spite of much wrong- 
doing, the man was saved by that divine qual- 
ity, so largely possessed by the great Jews of 
that far-away time — his yearning after God. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 5 

He may not have penned those deathless 
lines — "My soul thirsteth for God, for the 
living God: when shall I come and appear 
before God?" But doubtless some such long- 
ing it was that impelled him to build a temple 
that should permanently enshrine Jehovah's 
worship. 

Those who are inspired to great aims must 
have souls stout enough to endure great dis- 
appointments. It is not given to the truly 
great to have here their heart's desire. So runs 
the story of the painful earth, and David's 
ambition must be thwarted just when it is 
wisest and most far-reaching. His political 
insight taught him that the nation he had 
organized must have its beliefs and aspira- 
tions embodied and made visible in a temple. 
Such a central meeting-place would cement 
the still but partially united tribes; would 
tend to educate and purify the religious in- 
stincts of the people ; would serve as a strong 
defence against encroaching idolatries, and at 
the same time prove the best possible bulwark 
for his throne. 



6 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

His political as well as his religious genius, 
then, urged on the building of the great tem- 
ple ; and if he may not accomplish the work 
he has so nobly planned for, it shall be Solo- 
mon's first care. " I in my trouble, in times 
of war, mid a reign of blood, have ever held 
before me the one great aim — such provisions 
I have made. I have done what I can. Thou, 
Solomon, mayest add thereto. " The long 
past veils from our eyes that golden temple 
and its worshipping throngs. What was there 
said and sung is but a legend to us. But the 
reality and worth of it are unquestionable. 
David's foresight and Solomon's magnificence 
gave shape and expression to Jewish mono- 
theism. 

We owe much to the beauty-loving Greeks; 
we owe much to the law-making Romans ; but 
more, far more do we owe to the God-loving 
Jews. Vitalized, purified by the God-desire, 
round that temple grew a national life whose 
persistence is the wonder of all history, suc- 
cessfully resisting those forces of disintegra- 
tion that shattered and scattered nations far 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 7 

mightier than they. A national poetry grew 
up there, far the best religious poetry the 
world has ever seen. And a legal code was 
given to men, embodying social and religious 
ideals immensely in advance of any other we 
know of, at least in the Western world. Yes, 
the more the religious history of the world 
comes to be known, the greater the debt of 
mankind to the Jew appears. To him we owe 
a literature that still may be said to embody 
the wisdom and hopes of our race. It is but a 
truism to say that the Jewish religion had in 
it the capacity to grow, to change, to adapt 
itself. It took in many things from many peo- 
ples (probably the belief in life for man be- 
yond the grave, from the Persians). It assim- 
ilated them, and was not assimilated by them. 
It could and did develop into Christianity. 
But where lay the secret of this power of 
growth and development ? "What had this re- 
ligion, held by these puny tribes, in it that 
the religions of far greater and more culti- 
vated peoples lacked? I think I am right in 
pointing out one great vital quality it had that 



8 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

made it a growing religion, a religion that 
from its very nature would voice itself in new 
psalms, new poetry, new religious and moral 
teachings of preacher prophets, who looked 
out keenly on men and the times, and saw, 
with a real illumination, what duty for them- 
selves and for their fellows meant. 

That one priceless quality possessed by Jew- 
ish monotheism was a steadfast determina- 
tion to explain life in terms of God. The 
God of David and Solomon, the God of the 
exiles and of the great Isaiahs, was more than 
intensely interested in man's life. He was no 
Jupiter, sitting far aloft, moved only to occa- 
sional interest in the struggling life of men. 
He was with his people, cheering, guiding, 
chastening, rewarding ; they, as it were, made 
visible on earth his will ; their success was his 
glory ; their shame and fall involved humilia- 
tion for him. His word was their law; his 
honor their honor ; he was a God loho cared. 
Of course so exalted a conception of God was 
not born in a day. The god of the earliest 
days was a narrower, more merely tribal god, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 9 

than the god of later enlightened times. Men 
never have conceived and never can conceive 
of God other than as a mighty man. This is 
one of the well-established limitations of hu- 
man thought, quite as evident in our latest 
philosophies as in the discarded ideals of the 
great men of long ago. 

These Jews were cruel. The race meant 
nothing to them ; their tribe everything. The 
only god they were therefore capable of wor- 
shipping was at times cruel and narrow, and 
tribal like themselves; was for them and 
against all others. Yet steadily, wonderfully, 
their idea of God grew in beauty, purity, and 
spiritual power, till the merely tribal god 
vanished, and in his place we see with wonder 
standing the God of the whole earth ; a god 
to love as truly as to fear; a god whose high 
and holy law reached far above the attain- 
ments of the best of men. That idea held the 
Jew to his best. Did he stray from it for a 
time and fall, then some new poet, some new 
voice of warning or of prophecy was heard, 
and true religion was revived again. 



10 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Men's thoughts widen with the process of 
the suns, and so widening, first outgrow, and 
then cast aside, the older religious ideals that 
have been produced by them. This process, 
of course, is evident in the history of Jewish 
religion. And if the various parts of its 
matchless literature, which we call the Old 
Testament, were better arranged than they 
are at present in the common Bible we read, 
this gradual discarding of old ideas, and their 
replacement by new, would be much more 
evident than it is. Contrasting with the merely 
tribal god of the Exodus, let me quote a pas- 
sage that gives us the God of the later Psalms. 
Leave out one or two lines in this marvellous 
poem, and not among all the prayers that in 
all the ages inspired men have raised to God 
can be found anything more exquisite in its 
adoration, more beautiful, more inspiring : — 

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? or whither 
shall I flee from thy presence ? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : if I 
make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in 
the uttermost parts of the sea, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 11 

Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right 
hand shall hold me. 

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, 
O God ! how great is the sum of them J 

Search me, O God, and know my heart ; try me, 
and know my thoughts : 

And see if there be any wicked way in me, and 
lead me in the way everlasting. 1 

It is this unique power of growth, of ex- 
panding with, and possessing itself of, the 
widening views of man, which has made the 
Jewish religion immortal. Nor do I believe 
that even now its vitality has quite passed 
away. Modern Judaism may seem to many 
dry and seedless; capable of producing no 
new religious ideals, having lost its adapta- 
bility. But the extraordinary thing about 
Judaism is that, speaking generally, it has not 
given birth to crude and harmful religious 
movements as have other religions. For a 
long time its stem may seem dry and lifeless. 
It has not at least burst forth into evil flower 
and corrupt fruit. We Christians are too 
hasty in concluding that that race to whom 
1 Ps. cxxxix, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 23, 24. 



12 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

our religious debt is so unspeakably great has 
seen its last vision, has given forth its last 
message. The path of the religious Jew is not 
our path to-day. Christian orthodoxy still 
despises him and it. Still, at least, the shadows 
of the ignorant animosities of long ago cling 
to him. Once he made a fatal mistake, it is 
true ; but has Christianity always chosen 
rightly? Surely few unprejudiced students of 
history would say as much. In the cult of the 
Virgin and of the saints, both East and West 
have widely departed from the religion of 
Jesus and of the earlier day. Nay, surely the 
time has come when Protestantism must admit 
that in claiming for the Bible inerrancy, and 
making that book the sole test of truth, it 
has greatly erred. 

If, as we must believe, the time approaches 
(God in his mercy grant it may come soon) 
when all good men everywhere will recognize 
the need of subordinating, I do not say elim- 
inating, all creeds, when good men every- 
where, feeling their need of God in this world, 
shall turn towards good men with outstretched 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 13 

hands, may it not then come to pass that the 
Jew, to whom above all others religion owes 
its greatest debt in the past, may prove cap- 
able and willing to aid effectively in that 
great getting together which the future has 
in store for us? 

If you have followed me so far, you already 
see the point I desire to press on you in these 
lectures that I am to deliver. It is this : The 
genius and germ of a world religion were 
present even in early Judaism, because that 
religion was from the beginning committed 
to an explanation, first of a small tribe's life, 
later of man's life, in terms of God. They 
were but men, these Jews, and so their reli- 
gious vision often grew dim. They were nar- 
row-minded, — so were all men then, — and 
their religion might be narrow; a religion 
depended on a law, a priesthood, or a book. 
But their monotheism had within it that 
which was destined to burst through and 
overpass all the temporary barriers that hu- 
man ignorance employs to dim the light of 



14 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

God in the soul. It was to prove itself the 
mustard seed, least of all seeds, from which 
man's highest and purest concepts of God 
have sprung. It made God responsible for the 
soul of man. It dared to believe that human 
life was actually a breath of God in its be- 
ginning, an honoring and serving of God 
in its course, and a returning to God at its 
close. Surely this was high thinking, indeed, 
for those men of old time. Theirs was a vis- 
ion far clearer than that given to any other 
sons of men. Theirs was a mighty faith; and 
bravely and continuously they looked to God, 
the God of the life of men, to justify it and 
to vindicate them. Surely they did not look 
in vain. Their miraculous survival till to-day 
is that great faith's best vindication. They 
gave to mankind Jesus the Christ, and alone 
among the nations of his time they survive 
to witness his world-wide victory. 

Now it must be apparent that if we can 
thus think of our religion, then our thinking 
is fully in accord with the thoughts of men 
busied in other departments of knowledge and 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 15 

speculation. The order of the universe as it is 
conceived of to-day is an order of progress 
and of growth. If religion is not a settled, 
stablished, changeless thing, but a sense of 
duty, a vision of the great source of all law 
and duty, that changes and grows clearer 
from age to age, then religious thinking fits 
in admirably with man's modern knowledge 
and modern methods of adding to this know- 
ledge; and the idea that true science and true 
religion ever really were or ever can be at war 
is demonstrably absurd. Their advocates may 
have fought in the past and they may fight in 
the future — for the best and most honest- 
hearted of us are at times warped and preju- 
diced; but the spirit of strife helps no man 
up the hard high way, by which alone truth 
may be won. 

If we, then, can but see once for all that 
there are not two ways of winning truth or 
gaining its great goal, but only one, and that 
that way is an old way, literally as old as the 
hills, as old as the old world's order, then 
surely we have gained something that is well 



16 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

worth while. At best life is often a lonely- 
business ; but we are less lonely on life's path- 
way for the knowing that many whom we 
have been taught to think of as in " another 
camp" than ours are really only in another 
regiment of the very same great army, and 
are trying to do just what we know we must 
keep trying to do, too — namely, add our lit- 
tle of effort or discovery to what is worthy in 
life's slowly growing heap of things that shall 
endure. 

I said just now that this view of religion is 
old as the world's order. For what is that or- 
der? A fire, mist, a planet, granite, chalk, 
marl, soil, an age-long process, as the result 
of which there at last is spread over the cool- 
ing surface of our world a thin crust of soil, 
on which and by which vegetable, animal, and 
then human life may subsist. So to us the 
very crust of the earth seems to cry, " Come, 
man, be a fellow worker with me; for ages 
and ages I have been preparing myself for 
you. Now, lord of creation, take up bravely 
thine own subtler tasks ; see what I have done 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 17 

to prepare myself for thy lordship. I in my 
trouble have so much wrought; thou may est 
add thereto." 

As we dip into history it is the same story. 
The past takes voice, the forgotten millions 
of long ago who have gone the way of " dusty 
death" seem to cry, " We fought, we bled, we 
died, to win for you the comparative calm and 
prosperity of your day. Think of us when you 
work and are discouraged. Think of us when 
you plan and are baffled. Think of us when 
you falter and grow weary. Add thou thereto." 

The social spirit makes the same appeal. 
The people that have come or are coming to 
us come from many different nations of the 
earth. They are far from being the least 
worthy representatives of those peoples. It 
surely takes no small amount of courage and 
of energy to break the dear ties of home and 
fatherland and adventure into new and strange 
circumstances. We loudly praise, we proudly 
acknowledge, the heroism of those iron-souled 
men and women who first sought our shores. 
But we too often fail to recognize the pluck 



18 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

and self-denial that alone enables the common 
emigrant of to-day to break away from a past 
he knows and push his lonely fortune among 
strange peoples and strange lands. 

Believe me, it is not the weaklings of the 
world who are adding their bloods to ours, who 
are bringing their muscles and their energy 
to the solving of our problems and the devel- 
opment of our state. These are tried sol- 
diers. They have the signs and scars of life's 
battle on them, have these men and women 
and little children. Honest, charitable, wise 
hosts to these multitudes we are called to be. 
Surely to no people did the social spirit ever 
more clearly appeal than to us. You are the 
children of the emigrant. More than two hun- 
dred and fifty years ago your fathers began 
to come, when nothing but the broad rich 
breast of an unexplored continent invited 
them ; and since those days that strenuous 
hopeful tide has never ceased to flow, and 
your comfort and your wealth, your capacity 
and education to-day are the fruits and results 
of that flowing. Do your part. It is not the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 19 

part your fathers played. The wilderness has 
vanished. The savage is now scarcely more than 
a name hy which lake, river, or mountain is 
known. But a vast free country, a highly or- 
ganized civilization have grown up as if by 
magic. A great political democracy here opens 
wide its gate of hope and promise to the 
world. This is a tremendous thing that we 
profess to offer. It is for each of us to try to 
make the promise good. 

A Croatian peasant had made his way to an 
Adriatic port. " Why," said a stranger who 
happened to speak his language, — " why are 
you leaving your fatherland and going forth 
to an alien people, to a land so far across the 
sea?" "I go," said he, "to see if there is a 
country where there is justice between man 
and man." Ah, that is a tremendous thing to 
ask of any country, in which poor faulty man, 
but half delivered from the power of the beast 
within him, lives and rules. Yet such is the 
unquenchable and growing sense of righteous- 
ness in us that we will not be contented with 
even the poor Croatian's dream, but we must 



20 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

add to it the warming touch of brotherly love 
that alone makes dear the thought of home 
or fatherland. Yes, mankind evidently ex- 
pects much of us. And it is our high calling, 
our deep religious duty not to disappoint man- 
kind of its hope. But let us not go blindfold 
towards the future. To make good, all that is 
best in all of us is likely to be taxed to the 
very utmost. 

The brave pioneers I spoke of, even the 
fighting men of '61-65, had a task that was 
simplicity itself compared to the task con- 
fronting us. It is when we are thoughtful, 
when we find ourselves sitting down and try- 
ing to do what Jesus advised men to do, — 
count the cost of things, and try our souls 
to see if we are ready to play our part, able 
with our ten thousand to meet him that com- 
eth against us with twenty thousand, — it is, 
I say, when the healthy mood is on us that 
we feel our real resting-place is alone found in 
God ; in God and his order ; that good must 
win in the end because it is good, and light 
overcome the darkness because it is light; that 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 21 

greater is He that is with us than all that can 
be against us ; that the success of the King- 
dom of Heaven depends on no movement in 
races of men, but on the very nature of things. 

It fortifies my soul to know- 
That though I perish, truth is so ; 
That howsoe'er I stray and range, 
Whate'er I do, thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 
That, though I slip, thou dost not fall. 

Yes, God back of the nature of things 
makes good. "He that believeth shall not 
make haste," says the old Book. And the 
man grasping this strong consolation is not 
dismayed or disappointed by the slow grinding 
of God's grist, nor by the at times impercept- 
ible progress of what we call civilization. Civ- 
ilization rises as the coral islands rise, through 
dark and unrecorded ages. Gerald Massey, the 
poet of Chartist days in England, truly said, 

"We rise like corals grave by grave 
That have a pathway sunward. 

Down in the dark sea depths the foundations 
of future life and beauty are slowly laid. 
Each generation of little toilers lives, builds, 



22 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

dies, and broad and strong the foundations 
are cemented together. Slowly the adamant 
building mounts to the upper sunlit waters, 
till at last the crispy, creamy spray marks 
where they meet the sun. To all the winds 
and forces of the upper world the little 
builders seem to cry, " For ages and ages in 
the darkness we have toiled and died. Now, 
add ye to what we have done." 

And so the slow-growing debris of ocean 
comes " and adds thereto," and the sea birds 
come and " add thereto " — and the grasses 
and trees come ; and at last comes wandering, 
careless man, and takes the sea island for his 
home. At first he lives an almost bestial life, 
is content merely to exist. The shellfish and 
the nut sustain him ; the palm leaf or the 
cave give him shelter. But a day dawns when 
mysteriously the spirit of the great Whole 
takes voice within him ; the spirit that bade 
the coral insect toil in the salt, sunless gulfs 
of the sea, that made the bird build, and the 
grass grow — the same spirit is in him, and in 
him finds a voice. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 23 

He begins dimly to see something of the 
meaning of it all ; the age-long voice of God, 
first a blind instinct, then slowly shaping in 
the dim recesses of his mind an idea of law. 
From the coral beneath his feet, from the 
palm tree above his head, from the surf's 
thunder on the reef, from the undiscovered 
depths of his own soul, the voice comes. " We 
in our trouble have done what we could. 
man, Lord of creation, thou who art the ex- 
planation and justification of our long tra- 
vail, add thou thereto" And so for the first 
time the song of the world becomes articulate ; 
and he — a son of God, for whom all things 
have so long waited — gathers his children 
round him as life's forces fail him, and says, 
"It is worth while; it is well worth while, my 
children. It is for you to carry forward the 
cause of good. Painful ages have spent them- 
selves in preparing the way you are called to 
walk in. Lives innumerable struggled and 
died to make it smooth. The very soil you live 
by is one mighty grave. The very ground you 
tread on is holy. See, then, that you play 



24 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

your part in building the temple of the Lord." 

Ah, true it is — 

Our lives are beautiful through drudgeries 

Of those who gave them time and space to grow 

Through generations to the perfect curve. 

Our hair has got the gold, because the dust 

Of the world's highways often soiled the feet of our 

forefathers, 
And the blue-veined hands were moulded to their 

tenderness of touch 
By centuries of labor rude and hard. 

As I conclude, let me leave the general as- 
pect of this question, and come to a personal 
view of it. There are few, indeed, of us who, 
as we allow our thoughts to search the past, 
do not recall, it may be with something of 
remorse, yet also with gratitude, the good, 
the lovely, the loving we knew long ago. Full 
well we know that any good thing there is in 
us, any worthy thing we have accomplished, 
is greatly due to them: fathers and mothers 
and dear friends who did much, and suffered 
much, to make us better than we promised to 
be — to give us a prospect of truly succeeding 
in life. Yes, there are many of you young 
people listening to me now who could not 



THE KELIGION OF JESUS 25 

possibly have hoped to enjoy the opportunities 
of a great university had not those who loved 
you slaved and denied themselves for long 
cruel years, that the splendid chance that now 
is yours might be won for you. Ah, the best 
of us need sometimes to be reminded of these 
commonplaces of home life. Some of us for- 
get them, or take them as matters of course, 
for it is sadly possible to suffer ideals that 
kept alive faith and hope and the confidence 
in the worth-while of life, in parents whose 
circumstances were those of hardship, to 
wither away and fail in the children whose 
lives are lives of ease. It is the thought of 
my own home that makes me speak thus to 
you — a home in Ireland, where father and 
mother and eight little children lived happily 
together on fifteen hundred dollars a year. 
Eight mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, and 
minds to educate, on that modest sum. If we 
had anything nice to eat — or unusually good 
to cover us — it was because they denied 
themselves. We had beautiful scenery at our 
doors, and beautiful flowers in our garden. 



26 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

My father's roses were famous, and as a treat 
I was allowed to help my mother in her gar- 
den, where, during summer, she was busy 
long before my early school hour of seven 
o'clock. Brave in spirit but frail in body was 
our mother, and pain long and hard claimed 
her while we were yet very young. So we 
went forth into the wide world each to fight 
his way, and realized little, indeed, how great 
was our debt to that little vicarage home, or 
to those who had made it so soft and warm a 
resting-place for the young brood. Ah, and 
then — death broke up the circle, and she 
who was its central power was gone, and we 
could only think of things, and wish we had 
but thought them sooner, so that we might 
have said them. For it is poor and unsatisfac- 
tory business to think loving things of those 
we owe everything to, and then to lock up 
our thoughts in our breasts, so none is the 
wiser. Undignified talking this for a univers- 
ity lecturer, yet, since it is true, though God 
knows how small a part of the truth, it shall 
stand. Perhaps it may help some here to a 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 27 

step they never surely will regret; help you 
to cast false shyness and shame aside, and go 
to some in whose debt you heavily are, and 
do what you can, not to discharge it, — that 
cannot be, — but at least to acknowledge it. 

Of ourselves we have done very little ; all 
intelligent people are beginning to recognize 
this. Yet the false, ignorant spirit of conceit 
and brag is with us still. "I am what I am 
because I won my own success. I won life's 
game off my own bat. I have made good." 
Words still too common, alas ! The words of 
an ignorant and ungrateful fool. 

" I know what I know because I studied 
long and hard. I have searched and found 
what I needed, what I sought." No true 
scholar speaks thus. He knows too well that 
it is to the study of others, often of forgotten 
and unrewarded men, that he owes such little 
light of uncertain knowledge as may illumine 
the semi-darkness of his mind. " I have what 
I have because I earned it. I will do what I 
will with my own." Enlightened sense of com- 



28 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

mon justice is fast hastening to take this last 
sort of fool by the throat, and if common 
sense cannot teach him his folly and dishon- 
esty, common law surely will. 

We are only dusty soldiers in a great army 
on a long, long march; we advance and re- 
treat, sway onward, bend backward in an age- 
long struggle ; little coral insects building, in 
darkness and storm, the living places of the 
far future. We need religion or we shall not 
believe in the worth-whileness of it all. And 
we, lacking it, will stray from the marching 
line to grasp at flowers that wither, or to seize 
on dangerous fruits that decay and turn to 
dust. And the religion we must have must be 
a religion justifying man's life on this earth, 
and giving some insight as to earth's meaning. 
Here and noio it must help us see that good- 
ness is worth the trouble it costs ; that we are 
in honor bound to aim for the highest. We 
shall not always see this. We may stray from 
the marching line, to gather the flowers, to 
surfeit ourselves on the fruit; but then such 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 29 

excursions are things to blush for, are deser- 
tions of good comrades, and bring danger to 
them and shame to ourselves. I believe such a 
reasonable and necessary religion Jesus Christ 
brought to men. More than that, I believe 
that he is revealing such a religion to us to- 
day ; that even now he speaks to the toilers, 
the truth-seekers, the lovers of good, the piti- 
ful, the brave, everywhere ; that not only to 
those who make a success of their struggle 
after better things, but to the vastly larger 
number who make what seems a failure of it, 
he speaks. 

If this is true, how, then, account for the 
discouragement and division so evident to-day 
in the Christian churches? Discouragement is 
surely not generally in the air. In all other de- 
partments of life there is no lack of buoyancy 
and confidence. There is a very general con- 
sciousness that we are accomplishing some- 
thing, that we are adding to the achievements 
of our fathers, that we are "making good." 
Knowledge advances with leaps and bounds. 
We are uncovering some of Nature's secrets. 



30 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

We are using her beneficent resources to over- 
come or mitigate the pains and penalties she 
has for so long laid remorselessly on us. Hope- 
fully, confidently, we are learning to face our 
problems and to prepare for our future. 

Can we truthfully claim that this is reli- 
gion's attitude also ? I fear we cannot ; at least 
in so far as the orthodox churches express for 
us religion. In the churches a spirit of doubt, 
disheartenment, and division is too evident, 
and one of its chief causes I hold to be this, 
the churches' fear of change. They always 
have feared it, and that fear, harmful and 
limiting as it has proved in the (shall I call 
them?) dormant ages, is doubly so in times 
like our own, when a rush of new ideas, a tor- 
rent of life, sweeps through the veins of man- 
kind. The churches are dismayed by the 
clamorous demands made on them both from 
within and from without their borders. They 
are in danger of forgetting the very nature 
of the truth they only exist to conserve and 
reveal, namely, no religion can help or inspire 
man when it ceases to explain his life in terms 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 31 

of God. It is cold comfort to the scholar to 
believe that his forbears worshipped God as 
they pursued their studies, but as for him he 
must make choice between his studies and his 
father's God. The spirit of timidity is the very 
last spirit that can accomplish any worthy 
thing to-day. Scholarship advances every- 
where with joy. Its confident joy is its 
strength. In all departments of man's search- 
ing he goes forth bravely to seek the truth, 
assured that the truth is a good thing, and 
well worth the seeking; that pain and self- 
denial are well endured if he but win a tiny 
grain of truth, to be reverently added to the 
slowly mounting heap of man's acquirement. 
The religious searcher after truth, or rather, 
I should say, the student who remains in the 
pale of orthodoxy, is alone hampered. Voices 
that speak with authority, and other voices, 
at least as urgent, who have no authorization 
at all, alike bid him to be careful. " You may 
search where you like," they cry, "but beware 
that you only find what we approve (who our- 
selves have no time or ability to search). 



32 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Otherwise you must leave our company ; you 
must take your place outside the pale of or- 
ganized Christianity." 

It is all wrong, terribly wrong. Religion 
and life are one. There are no two kinds of 
truth. There are no two ways of finding 
truth. And if in a time when life is changing, 
greatly, gloriously, religion hesitates to change 
too, then life and religion must, temporarily 
at least, take different roads and part company, 
and that means the saddening of life and the 
withering of religion. 

It is, then, to the inevitableness and reason- 
ableness of change in our religious beliefs, as 
in every other department of our lives, that I 
am now going to call your attention. Jesus 
was a profound believer in change, he himself 
proclaimed momentous changes, yet every- 
thing he taught was rooted in and sprang from 
the past. Change, he said, was not necessarily 
the destruction of the past, but the fulfilment 
of it. The nature of truth everywhere is the 
same — it is seed; and seed must die that it 
may grow, and change that it may live. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 33 



II 



JESUS' DOCTRINE OF THE SEED: THE METHOD 
OF GROWTH AND CHANGE 



Jesus said, " So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should cast 
seed into the ground ; . . . and the seed should spring and grow 
up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of 
herself." — Mark iv, 26-28. 

I said the Jewish religion was an effort to 
explain life in terms of God ; life as they saw 
it ; to justify life as they knew it. That is what 
a real religion must ever attempt to do if it 
would live at all. 

From the nature of things such a religion 
is committed to change. Its advocates and de- 
fenders may forget, and often have forgotten 
this, may and often do fiercely deny and re- 
sent it, but the inevitable fact remains. For 
what is life ? Life is an open book in which 
each generation of men writes its own story, 
and that story is completely different from 
all the stories that have preceded it. Life is 



34 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

a great building, rising as the coral islands 
rose — 

We rise like corals grave by grave 

That have a pathway sunward. 

Each generation, each race of men adds its 
course of stone or brick or perishable rubble 
to what other builders have built before it. 
The problems of each decade change. If re- 
ligion only affords answers to the questions 
of days gone by, men living in a vital present 
will soon cease to question it. So much is 
evident, surely. 

There are those who are quick to recognize 
this need of flexibility in religious formulae, 
and at the same time profess themselves dis- 
tressed at the doubtfulness and uncertainty 
that often characterizes the best religious 
teaching they have access to. This is not a 
reasonable position to take. Real religion, 
true to its best ideals, bending all its energy 
to illumine and explain life's tragedies and 
mysteries, must of necessity halt, hesitate, and 
change, just because life halts and changes. 
It should be scarcely necessary to do more 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 35 

than state this fact, to commend its reason- 
ableness and necessity ; but surely it is often 
quite forgotten by those who should know 
better. Consider our own national life — free 
beyond compare, unburdened, unsaddened 
by the tragic and costly pasts that other na- 
tions have known. These others may advance 
hardily into the future, yet they are encum- 
bered with debts to be discharged. They are 
as men no longer young, seamed and scarred 
by wounds that have not only left indelible 
marks, but have drained away much of their 
vigor and national energy. The mistakes and 
sins of other times lie heavily on the freest 
of them. But we ! We have only our own 
brief problems to solve, our own hastily con- 
tracted debts to pay, and yet they are quite 
sufficient to give us cause for thoughtf ulness. 
Freest, youngest, richest, strongest of the 
nations we are, yet we have our problems, 
and they can only be successfully met in a 
spirit of confident faith in God and man. In 
that faith we may rejoice in our past, glory 
in what our forefathers won of freedom and 



36 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

unity, but we surely cannot continue to grow 
or to prosper if our eyes are chiefly directed 
to the past. Questions of to-day press on us 
that must be answered; duties that must be 
done. Do we falter before them because we 
cannot be always certain of the best and wisest 
thing to do, the straightest course to take? 
In these social matters, there is no one author- 
itative voice to answer oracularly our ques- 
tion; no one inspired leader to tell us how to 
accomplish our duty. No, up and down the 
land these things must be debated — in work- 
shop and in Wall Street ; in university, lec- 
ture-hall, and labor-union meeting; and in 
these, many conclusions are arrived at, many 
halting and sometimes conflicting theories ad- 
vanced. Yet, since we believe that men gen- 
erally are trying to see straight and do right, 
we believe that out of the babel and confusion 
a clearer vision of duty, a stride forward in 
social progress, will in time be won. So we 
do not wait for an infallible leadership, but 
follow such light as we have, attempting 
bravely to do the thing that comes next to hand, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 37 

So much is evidently true of our national 
life, and since it is true, we are not at all 
dismayed if we see that great human column 
of the nation's progress at times sway, at 
times seem to stop and crumble away at the 
head, as it storms onward on life's battle-field. 
"Such is life," we say. Only by struggle, 
by fierce contrast and comparison can the 
best in ideas or the best in men win out, and 
be approved as fittest to last and survive. 

Yes, such is life's law of progress, and 
truth's law. Such is the law of all brave ad- 
venture, and of all true discovery, and such 
must be religion's law too. To separate reli- 
gion from these, to demand for it another and 
a different order of progress, is fatal to its 
vitality, is fatal to its final acceptance by 
thinking men. Yet good men are ever forget- 
ting this, and Jesus sought to remind them 
of it when he gave forth his great doctrine 
of the Seed. 

Jesus as a teacher found himself confronted 
by an immense development of religious ideas 
that had grown up round the simple and 



38 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

earlier faith of his race. There was nothing 
extraordinary in this ; nay, it was natural and 
necessary. Growth and addition are an evi- 
dence of life. "Add thou thereto" is the 
voice of every living faith. It is a truism of 
religious history to say that, so soon as in 
any religion signs of growth and addition 
fail, that religion is decaying, and must soon, 
in the nature of things, take its place among 
the vast number of forgotten beliefs that 
flourished but for a time. These growths are 
like the branches of a tree. Some will endure 
all stress of storm and sun, be incorporated 
in the tree, and live in its life so long as the 
tree lives; and some have not enough vitality 
to endure, but fall or are cut away, and the 
tree lives on without them, and is the better 
for the parting. 

Now a time had arrived in the religious life 
of Judaism when these accumulations had to 
be dealt with. A house-cleaning of the faith 
was due, and Jesus felt that this heavy and 
thankless task was laid on him. The life of 
the spirit was in Judaism still, but so overlaid 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 39 

by the garments men had woven to protect it, 
so hidden by the pictures they had painted to 
explain it, that garments or pictures were by 
the multitude taken for the vital realities 
themselves. 

Jesus constantly proclaims that true religion 
is a growing thing. He will give place to no 
man in honoring the men by whom the spirit 
of the ever-living God spake in the times of 
the past ; but he believes that God as truly 
speaks to men in his own times as in those 
great days of long ago. And more than that, 
he believes that God will as truly continue to 
speak to men in the times that lie beyond; 
that those who come after him will see clearer 
lights and do greater deeds than he. 1 

Jesus is in short an evolutionist. He will 
not cast himself loose from the past. He 
knows well, he ever insists, that he is what he 
is ; he knows what he knows, because of it. 
Instinctively he knows that all true develop- 
ment and progress are out of, and because of, 
all that has gone before. He would preserve, 

1 See John xiv, 12. 



40 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

not destroy, those structures, habits, tenden- 
cies, which have proved themselves to be suit- 
able and worthy. Again and again he protests 
that he is no destroyer, but a constructor. 
When he is confronted by his enemies, among 
whom are numbered the most religious men 
of the time, when they oppose his teaching 
and accuse him of heresy, blasphemy, and 
treason to the cause of the God of the Jews, 
he confounds them by turning to the old writ- 
ings. The law, the psalms, the prophets, all 
in turn he quotes with a profound knowledge, 
with a spiritual insight and acumen that are 
astounding and convincing. His enemies may 
know the letter of religion and of its record ; 
its inner, truer meaning lies open to his mind. 
His opponents are often convinced and gener- 
ally silenced. 

Yes, the life of the spirit was in Judaism 
still. If it had not been so, then Jesus' pro- 
clamation and vindication of it against the 
ritualists would have quite failed, and his re- 
ligion would have died with him. As it was, 
he saved the precious thing beloved; he lifted 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 41 

it up ; he glorified and enlarged it. It had been 
a tribal religion ; he made it a religion of the 
Western world. 

Yet surely Jesus himself was right in his 
judgment of what he came to do (though in 
after centuries orthodoxy has persistently pro- 
claimed him mistaken). It was to proclaim a 
God and Father long ago proclaimed, to strip 
off the veils and coverings good men had mis- 
takenly spread over his face, and push aside 
the poor daubed pictures they had painted of 
him. 

It was not to destroy the law or the pro- 
phets, but to fulfil ; not to pull down the Tem- 
ple, but to tell its meaning; not to proclaim a 
new God, but a God long ago known and 
worshipped, — the Father, not of some favored 
Jews, but of all. His vision of God was his 
own, hut it was not a complete vision. He 
says so. But by its light he could and did 
claim to discriminate between what was of 
merely temporary and what of permanent 
value in the Jewish religion of the day. (Of 
other religions he knew nothing.) He made 



42 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

God nearer, clearer, to simple men. He gave 
them a more inspiring view of duty, a calmer 
courage, a purer faith. He always appealed to 
the divine quality in men. He called on them 
to see the light. He told them they had the 
power to follow it. He had no quarrel with 
authority. The priests and Pharisees sit in 
Moses' seat. Their official position he accepts, 
for he is a Jew. But their perversion of the 
truth they profess to defend he denounces, 
for the one aim and end of his life is to be 
true, and to speak the truth ; and all things 
that hide or distort the truth are not of God, 
but of evil. 

Thus Jesus went forth upon his lonely way. 
He was called a destroyer ; he was in truth an 
evolutionist. He courted and met a destroyer's 
doom, and died for an everlasting principle. 1 

1 After delivering these lectures, I read Harnack's Con- 
stitution and Law of the Churchy which has just been given us 
in an English translation. To my great satisfaction, I find 
that this profound scholar fully upholds and endorses the 
view I have ventured to present of Jesus' relation to Judaism. 
On page 4 of the Introduction, Harnack says : "The Church 
is younger and older than Jesus. It existed in a certain sense 
long before him. It was founded by the prophets, in the first 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 43 

That principle was the principle of the 
seed. Eeligious truth is a divine seed sown in 
human life. There is nothing new or startling 
in that, you say; every one admits as much. 
But it is not so. So far as I know, or have been 
able to learn, Jesus Christ was the first reli- 
gious teacher so to define truth and man's rela- 
tion to it. His disciples certainly at first did not 
understand the significance of this definition 
of his. To his opponents and detractors the 
simile itself must have been meaningless, and 
his application of it aroused their fear and 
wrath. It was a sweetly reasonable doctrine, 
but it was also an epoch-making doctrine. 
For it asserted not merely that truth (as we 
poor men down here get to see it) may grow 
and change from age to age, but that by vir- 
tue of its very nature and environment, it 
must so grow and change or speedily die. It 
was a definition that struck hard at one of the 
most cherished beliefs, not of the Jewish peo- 
ple alone, but of the whole race. To accept it 

place, within Israel, but even at that time it pointed beyond 
itself. All subsequent developments are changes of form." 



44 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

meant that the danger to true religion arises 
not only from those who attack its claims 
from without, but from those, its would-be, 
often honest-minded defenders, who cham- 
pion its cause from within. 

The very zeal of those who defend religion 
might, in Jesus' view, prove a chief cause of 
danger ; might threaten and even destroy the 
very precious thing they were fain to defend. 
In the very interests of the truth itself, many 
such men, in all religions, in all parts of the 
world, have been found, who manfully, de- 
votedly protested against change in the belief 
they loved. Those advocating change were to 
them, by that very advocacy, clearly revealed 
as enemies of their great cause of truth — 
profaners, desecrators of the shrines of the 
gods. If circumstances place power in such 
men's hands, without question or quarter, they 
will unhesitatingly use such power to crush to 
the earth these mistaken, nay, wicked advo- 
cates of what to them is nothing less than a 
proclamation of religious anarchy and blas- 
phemy. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 45 

No, Jesus' definition is not so simple as it 
sounds. It can be quoted as a justification for 
all sorts of religious movements, sane and in- 
sane. It can be made, and has been made by 
the incontinent reformer, to cover and justify 
all reformations, even those of the iconoclast; 
to justify every crude and ephemeral heresy, 
from early gnosticism to the modern mon- 
strosities of Mormonism and Christian Science. 

I think I am safe in saying that as a whole 
the early Christian teachers did not under- 
stand the vital importance of this aspect of 
the Master's teaching. They fought shy of it. 
Those who did give prominence to the idea 
of development in Christianity, to the seed 
principle, as it were, though among them 
were the most brilliant minds of the time, 
often seem to have got out of touch with the 
general life of the Church (perhaps the Church 
was not yet ready for their teaching). Men 
who are out of touch with the general life of 
their time are, from the very nature of the 
isolation imposed on them, inclined to over- 
emphasis, over-statement, of the supremely 



46 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

good thing they see, and so, like a too heavily 
laden branch in a not too fruitful tree, they 
fall away, by reason of their own excess of 
productiveness, from the parent stem. Such 
is the sad history of many a heresy, of many 
a reform. The extremist has lost touch with 
the main trunk of the tree, which was neces- 
sary to him, and the semi-barren tree has lost 
the fruitful bough, which was a grievous loss 
to it. 

The forced importance, the wide signifi- 
cance of this simile of the seed, which Jesus 
chooses to explain the nature of his teaching 
and the quality and reproductive power of his 
word, are only realized as we remember that 
this insistence of his on the living, growing, 
changing property of truth runs through all 
he says, influences all he does. He dwells on 
it and enforces it. He is attacked by his ene- 
mies for proclaiming it, and finally it is the 
doctrine that sends him to his cross. 

Let me, then, briefly touch on the cause of 
this bitterness of opposition to a principle so 
reasonable. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 47 

Conservatism always makes a good fight 
for its own. In such proportion as we value 
what we hold, we rally our best forces to de- 
fend it. Conservatism has proved itself most 
stubborn of opponents for this very reason. 
It is the high value we attach to our beliefs 
that makes us rally to their defence against 
any and all who would alter them. In the 
hearts of multitudes of men the religious 
forms that have surrounded their youth are 
associated with what in retrospect seems to 
them beautiful and best worth having. It is 
the seed sown in youth's springtime, ideas 
implanted within us while we are very young, 
that root themselves most deeply. They take 
up more space within us than we ourselves 
are always aware, but they are also apt to lie 
more dormant than those ideas we call the 
secular. The stress and strain of life is on us. 
We are occupied with much serving. We are 
forced to activity in many ways, but this is 
apt not to be so true in our religious think- 
ing. 

No great religious disputes have arisen in 



48 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

our time — at least none that have called men 
to make sacrifices for what they believe, and 
so (I am only describing the case of the or- 
dinary man) the deeply planted ideas of our 
earliest days remain pretty much as they were. 
Besides, we are forced to such restlessness, 
such perpetual effort, in order to hold our own 
in many departments of our life, that we find 
it pleasant to have a quiet corner in it some- 
where. And if that corner is a little dusty from 
disuse, well, the very dust has a suggestion 
of an Old-World perfume, as those lavender- 
sprinkled cupboards of our mothers had, where 
the most precious household belongings were 
laid away from the vulgar eye. " Let us leave 
these sacred things alone/' we say. " Let us 
come to the religion of our forefathers to rest. 
There is so much new that we are obliged to 
study and use, so much in each department 
of life that must be changed, let us forget it 
here as long as we may. In social, political, 
mercantile, or artistic life, momentous change 
is everywhere in the air. Eadicalism is forced 
on us. Do let us be at least conservative in 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 49 

our religion. What is good enough for our 
parents is good enough for us." 

I am persuaded that this is a more common 
attitude than is generally supposed, and of 
course it is a very dead-and-alive and very 
unreal attitude. It can only result in the slow 
dying-out in a man of those deeply important 
things within him that he thinks he values 
most, but really neglects, till at last of him it 
may be true — 

Some souls are serfs among the free, 

While others nobly thrive ; 
They stand just where their fathers stood, 

Dead even while they live. 

But not to digress too far ! 

From modern excuses for a do-nothing pol- 
icy in religious thinking, let me hark back to 
the consideration of those circumstances that 
made Jesus seem a religious anarchist to the 
pious conservatism of his time, and brought 
down on him the hatred of the rulers of his 
people. Why should these people have op- 
posed him bitterly as they did ? Jesus himself 
was ever ready to recognize constituted author- 



50 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ity. "The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses* 
seat. Whatsoever they say unto you, do there- 
fore, but be ye not like to them." This was 
ever his attitude to the officers of the national 
religion as well as those charged with more 
secular rule. Thus, again, to the man who 
came to be healed he says : " Go show thyself 
to the priests and offer the gift that Moses 
commanded for a testimony to them " — i.e. 
" to prove to them that I am a law-abiding, 
God-honoring Jew, intent on obeying the law 
as well as the spirit of our country's religion." 

This being his attitude, how, then, account 
for the furious hatred that was satisfied with 
nothing less for him than the doom of the 
shameful cross? Were these priests and 
scribes, these politico-religious men that were 
the party bosses of their day — were they al- 
together evil? Were they hardened against 
all pity, and hopelessly bad? By no means. 
But they were committed, both by their incli- 
nations and by their interests, to a fixed con- 
servatism. 

The history of the Jews' fight for freedom 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 51 

since the return from captivity is a great story. 
The men who waged that struggle were men 
of high purpose, of desperate courage, and of 
faith in God. And doubtless these their suc- 
cessors had possibilities of heroism within 
them. They were of the same lump as those 
who, so soon after the days of Jesus, called 
together for the defence of all they held most 
dear the banded force of the little nation. 
And then behind the sacred city's wall, and 
later from street to street and court to court, 
made against the irresistible power and dis- 
cipline of Rome one of the most hopelessly 
heroic defences recorded in history. 

These men who opposed Jesus then were 
far from being utterly bad men. Yet they 
mistook their way. They ruined (as Jesus 
foretold they would) their country, and they 
did all that evil men might do to quench the 
light of the world. It is a heavy indictment 
that history has lodged against them, and yet 
they only did what others have done again 
and again. They were at least as much the 
victims of a mistaken policy as they were the 



52 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

perpetrators of a crime, and the order we live 
under punishes us as promptly for one as for 
the other. 

As I said, then, before, the very value the 
Jews and their leaders attached to the relig- 
ion, of which they rightly believed themselves 
to be the divinely appointed guardians, made 
them fanatically opposed to any changes in it 
— whether forced on them by foreign powers 
from without, or promulgated by unauthorized 
and irresponsible teachers, as they believed 
them to be, from within. 

Then their cause of quarrel with the Lord 
was clear — unmistakably clear. They would 
willingly die to defend what they thought 
was the truth, but what was actually only the 
corpse whence truth, the life, had fled. They 
were the " stand-patters " of their time. 
Jesus was the Radical of his. Jesus stood for 
the growth-principle, believed in the certainty 
and necessity of development and change in 
man's view of God and of his truth. These 
others held fast by the sacred deposit the 
nation had received. They regarded it as a 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 53 

treasure no hands but their own might touch 
— an Ark of the Covenant, so many inches 
wide, so many long, contaiuing so many sa- 
cred words and letters of directly revealed 
truth ; nay, every letter traced, as their holy 
tradition had it, by the finger of God. Theirs 
was the mistake, still made by good but mis- 
guided men to-day, that "the Faith once de- 
livered to the saints " was only to be expressed 
in the dogmas they propounded and defended. 

Needless to say, in the formulation of their 
theory, these religious conservators ignored 
both present facts and past history ; ignored 
the fact, which all scholars at that time knew 
well, that age by age round that law had 
grown up a vast mass of commentary and subtle 
explanation that had often, at least in the 
popular mind, become confused with the di- 
vine law itself. Jesus had accurately summed 
up the whole religious situation when he said, 
" Ye have made the law of God of none effect 
through your tradition." 

I dwell on this fatal conservatism of the op- 
ponents of our Lord, not chiefly because it 



54 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

explains the source of the orthodox hatred he 
drew down on himself, but particularly be- 
cause it furnishes an admirable illustration of 
a spirit that always has been and ever will be 
active in the mistaken defence of what it 
deems to be the truth — " a spirit of irrelig- 
ious solicitude for God" I would call it. 
Some old saint somewhere gave it that name. 
It seems to fit the case. 

This spirit of irreligious solicitude for God 
is not the spirit of one age only, but of all 
ages. It has been fatally active not in the his- 
tory of Christianity alone. Its presence is 
evident in the history of all the great religions. 
Earlier and purer Mohammedanism has suf- 
fered, as Judaism suffered, at the hands of its 
self-constituted guardians and exponents. A 
Mohammedan reformer might also truly say, 
" Ye have made God's law of none effect 
through your tradition. ,, 

Looking back through the dim spectacles 
of history on the struggle round the person 
and teaching of Jesus, it seems a one-sided 
affair. All goodness and beauty on one side ; 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 55 

all that is vile and vicious on the other. Ig- 
norant, unhistoric ages have poured their vi- 
tuperation on the men who prepared the way 
for the Cross, and then firmly forced its vic- 
tim to his inevitable doom. But this was not 
Jesus' own view. He was full of mercy and 
charity for the generation that rejected and 
martyred him. Of priest, Pharisee, scribe, and 
multitude it was alike true, " They knew not 
what they did " ; and yet their own history 
might have enlightened them. Let us look 
backward for a moment. 

The sacred religion of the Jews had already 
survived more than one catastrophe, had come 
through more than one tempest, had proved 
its possession of a vital power that no con- 
temporary religion seems to have possessed. 
In my first lecture I tried to trace the reason- 
ableness and necessity of the organic form 
which that religion took. The Temple, the 
one holy place, its priestly order, its rich rit- 
ual, served as the necessary centre of the na- 
tion's life, a nation, the special office of which 
was to preserve for our race a pure monothe- 



56 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ism. Other nations might gather round their 
kings and the temples of many gods. The 
Jews stood fast round the temple of one God, 
which took precedence of the throne of any 
Jewish king. 

In no land, in no religion, so far as I know, 
was there any counterpart to that sacredly 
unique building at Jerusalem. The vitality 
of this religion was to be subjected to a ter- 
rible test. There befell it a catastrophe that 
swept people and temple away. Conquest, fol- 
lowed by national transplantation, was a com- 
mon fate enough in those cruel days of old. 
To consolidate their strength, the greater 
peoples laid ruthless hands upon the less, who 
speedily were henceforth lost to history, they 
and their traditions disappearing forever. The 
rude Assyrian captain, standing before Jeru- 
salem's wall, spake no more than the truth 
when he said, " Hath any of the gods of the 
nations delivered at all his land out of the hand 
of the King of Assyria ? Where are the gods 
of Hamath and of Arpad ? Where are the gods 
of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah ? Have they 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 57 

delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who are 
they, among all the gods of the countries, 
that have delivered their country out of my 
hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem 
out of my hand ? " 

Why, indeed, should Judah's case prove dif- 
ferent from these ? So it seemed, when finally 
the conquering horde swept over the land and 
the city. The sacred places are desecrated, 
every precious and holy thing is carried away. 
Quenched is the only light of Israel's God, 
and faithful and faithless have perished to- 
gether. 

Then a wonderful thing — a thing without 
a parallel in all history — comes to pass. 
Bereft of all religious opportunity, the great 
soul of a little people arises, and takes hold on 
the skirts of God. Without a temple or an 
altar, without a priestly order or any rites of 
sacrifice, in a remote and heathen land, the 
flame of a true worship of a true God flickers 
up in the darkness. In the hearts of brave men 
and women, in the voices of faithful preachers 
and poets, it was heard. The nation had truly 



58 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

gone down into its hell, and there it found its 
God anew. 

And so a national miracle was wrought, and 
these Jewish tribes — what was left of them, 
unimportant in their hour of prosperity even, 
diminished to a mere handful in their hour of 
loss — achieved what none of the great peo- 
ples of the earth ever achieved — a national 
resurrection. 

Needless to say, these returning survivors 
of a seventy years' captivity were no common 
men, were moved by no commonplace impulse. 
They came back wiser and more sober men. 
Yes, more than that. They came back with a 
larger faith, with a hope that till then had 
not (so far as we can learn from their pre- 
captivity writings) been any part of their re- 
ligion — the hope of personal immortality 
after death. Their bitter experience had tended 
to teach them that God cared, not for the na- 
tion only as the guardian of his truth, but for 
the individual too. They had learned to love 
their land, their temple, their law, their priestly 
order, and greatly yet they were to fight and 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 59 

suffer for these things. But the God who had 
led them back cared for something more even 
than these. He cared for man. Cut off from 
all they had been taught to hold sacred, all that 
their divinely given law had insistently pro- 
claimed necessary, denied priest, sacrifice, 
temple, altar, God had not denied himself to 
them. He had not turned away his face from 
them in their exile. He had hearkened to the 
voice of their prayer. Is it too much to say 
that, while they were exiles worshipping with- 
out a temple, the seed of that sublime truth 
which in after years was to be voiced by Jesus 
the Jew found lodgment in the Jewish na- 
tion's heart, and dimly the best of them fore- 
saw a day when the place or mode of man's 
worship should matter little, and the spirit of 
that worship matter all? when "neither in 
Gerzim, nor yet at Jerusalem should men wor- 
ship the Father, for he is a spirit and seeketh 
true worshippers to worship him in spirit and 
in truth"? 

Had, then, the glorious temple planned by 
David, the poet king, andbuilded by Solomon, 



60 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

quite failed of its purpose ? Surely not. It had, 
as it were, anchored the Jewish people during 
dark, stormy times. It had enabled the Jew to 
resist the disintegrating forces of a period dur- 
ing which the nations surrounding them seem 
one after another to have disappeared. It had 
accomplished more. It had helped to foster in 
the very heart of the Jew an understanding of 
and a love for monotheism, that no national 
calamity, not even a national exile among alien 
religionists, could overcome or destroy. 

The exile, then, had its uses. Its teachings 
were never, we may believe, quite lost. But by 
the time Jesus came they had in their turn been 
overlaid and long forgotten. The inevitable 
(shall we call it ?) conservatism of human na- 
ture had again asserted itself. Very soon it had 
built up round the growing seed of the truth 
new protecting walls and shields. The divine 
deposit of seed that the heathen captivity 
could not kill was so precious it must be care- 
fully guarded in a Pot Then the pot itself 
becomes precious, and naturally so, because 
it protects the seed. Presently the seed grows 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 61 

and sprouts above the pot, for it has life, it is 
seed, gets, in short, too big for the pot. And 
what are you going to do about it ? 

Ah, this quality of growth is a troublesome 
and painful thing — pain and striving, change 
and decay it means, but there is no real joy or 
power in living without it. We men are ever 
making choice between the growing seed and 
the containing pot, and as we choose wisely or 
ill, we succeed or we fail in life's great task, 
to advance or oppose the Kingdom of God 
and of truth. 

In the realm of what is called the practical, 
the penalties for refusal to acknowledge or 
obey the law of change are so severe, are so 
immediately operative, that stupidity itself can- 
not ignore or evade them. A man will insist 
on doing- business on the old stand where his 
father did it before him. His father succeeded 
there — he cannot. Business has drifted away 
from that quarter. He must follow the drift 
or lose his living. Harsh experience ruthlessly 
forces change on the most conservative busi- 
ness or professional man. If he put the pot's 



62 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

life before the seed's life, he is sooner or later 
a failure. The man who will not move on 
is lost. And knowing this, we send our boys 
to the best schools, colleges, universities, and 
insist that those who teach them, or supervise 
their studies there, should be men well ac- 
quainted with the last discoveries of science or 
latest conclusions of history. Let me sin against 
the law of progress in my business, in my daily 
contact with my fellows, and I am so immedi- 
ately punished that I am not likely quickly to 
sin again. In other departments of my life, 
though of course the same law holds good, I 
may not be so quick to see or prove its opera- 
tion. If my child is dangerously sick and I 
choose a doctor, I will insist that he is a man 
whose conservatism has not prevented his giv- 
ing thorough study to the new and wonderful 
medical discoveries of our day. I will not en- 
dure the idea that, because of any fad of his, 
my child should be denied the use of the serum 
for diphtheria, for instance, or Pasteur's treat- 
ment for rabies. But instill other departments 
of life, where reality is not so ruthlessly forced 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 63 

on me, and where I do not so quickly pay for 
my folly, it is just as likely as not that I will 
play the fool. I who insist that the pot shall not 
be preferred to the seed may be found putting 
up, just as the Jews did, a very pretty defence 
pro pot, contra seed. I may be ready to notice 
and condemn this fatally mistaken tendency in 
other men, or in other ages than my own, and 
yet range myself with those who are playing 
the very same part, advocating the same prin- 
ciple, in religious, sociological, or ethical mat- 
ters to-day. 

It is an easy matter to condemn those brave 
and obstinate Jews of long ago, but few trou- 
ble themselves to think out the reasons they 
had for a choice that to after ages appeared 
the wickedest, the most unreasonable that men 
could have made. But if it is ever right to 
prefer the life of the pot to the life of the 
seed it enshields, their choice was not so un- 
reasonable. 

Every reform — what is it but the seed 
power triumphing over the pot power? And 
no sooner are the shards of the once precious 



64 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

pot scattered abroad than we set to work to 
mould and bake a new pot — larger, more lib- 
eral in its measure — to contain the expanded 
seed. 

"Now, surely/' we say to ourselves, "we 
have something so wisely liberal, so compre- 
hensive, so purely true, all men can accept it. 
The holy seed has become, indeed, a tree. We 
admit as much — nay, we glory in it. But see 
what we have done. Here is a great hedge we 
have planted to protect our tree of truth. 
Here is a comprehensive creed we have evolved, 
to explain its origin, its nature, and the laws 
of its growth. The destructive changes of the 
past were necessary. The cruel breakings of 
the pots of other ages had to be. But now at 
last, see this new scheme, this splendid, all- 
containing pot of ours. These views of God, 
these definitions of his truth, are so catholic, 
so comprehensive, they will surely stand. May 
we not now at last hope to enjoy unity and 
peace ? All reasonable men cannot hesitate to 
accept them. Here at last is a sound credal 
platform, wide enough for all good men to 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 65 

stand together on, firmly built and strong 
enough to support us all." 

So, in all ages, often the wisest and brav- 
est and best have argued — so they still ar- 
gue to-day; and yet their conclusions have 
proved fallacious, their definitions failed to 
define, their comprehensions failed to compre- 
hend. Like old pots, cracked and useless, they 
were fated to be discarded by those who came 
after them, men who proved themselves as 
truly truth-seekers in their newer day and 
generation as these first had been valued for 
truth in the times before. For, ah! what is 
history? What but the story of the thoughts 
of men that widen with the process of the 
suns? 

The reformer often makes the same mistake 
as the tyrant. The tyrant consolidates his 
power till the reformer casts him down. The 
reformer sees an evil thing and valiantly 
strives to destroy it. On its ruin he builds the 
house of his fortune, and that house stands 
till the next age finds something false or dan- 
gerous or inadequate in it, and lo ! a new 



66 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

reformer arises and casts it down. For sadly 
true it is that the reforms of one age may be- 
come the tyrannies of the next. The much- 
lauded Puritan struck bravely at the tyranny 
of kings. It was a noble and a timely stroke. 
But scarcely had the Stuart's head fallen 
before the Puritan yoke lay heavy on free- 
dom's neck in England. The Puritan, like all 
Protestants, knew how bravely to protest 
against error. He thought he had the truth 
and all the truth, and was ready and willing 
to give it to men, but to give men liberty as 
well as the truth was quite another matter. It 
was full time that the pot of sacred monarchy 
was broken — and very thoroughly broken it 
was; but in a few years the iron pot of Puri- 
tanism that shattered it had itself, in the in- 
terests of freedom, truth, and mankind, to be 
shattered, too. 

Let me add one other historic illustration 
of the point I urge. On our Western conti- 
nent, at about the same time that privilege 
and Puritanism were settling their momentous 
dispute in England, an extraordinary enter- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 67 

prise was attempted by extraordinary men. 
" These/' as our great historian Parkman elo- 
quently says, " were no stern exiles seeking 
on barbarous shores an asylum for a perse- 
cuted faith. Rank, wealth, power, and royalty 
Itself smiled on their enterprise and bade 
them Godspeed. Yet, withal, a fervor more 
intense, a self-abnegation more complete, a 
self-devotion more constant and enduring, 
will scarcely find its record on the page of 
human history." Unlike as men could be to 
the stern and outlawed band that landed at 
Plymouth Rock, undoubtedly they were; yet 
was their courage as high, their aims not less 
noble. They would win the vast and unknown 
wilderness of North America, first to God, and 
then to France. To do so, they made light of 
danger and cheerfully went forth into a wild- 
erness where often death by famine or by 
torture awaited them. Such was Jesuitry at 
its best — in 1637. Before the end of that 
seventeenth century, the Canadian Jesuit had 
become at least as much a politician as a mis- 
sionary, and in the new world, as in the old, 



68 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

he was scheming and plotting to fasten the 
yoke of civil and religious bondage on men 
— was pursuing the path that, spite of splen- 
did self-sacrifice, has made the very name of 
Jesuit hated wherever progress and liberty are 
known. 

Those men heard the call of God and they 
heeded it, and the world still marvels at the 
sublime courage of their martyrdom. But 
they allowed themselves to be seduced from 
the high and narrow way. Irreligious solici- 
tude for God betrayed them, as so often it 
has betrayed the greatest soldiers of the cause. 
They came to value the dead pot more than 
the living seed; and thus inevitably it came 
about that the cause of the light against the 
darkness had to be entrusted to more progress- 
ive, more enlightened, but perhaps not bet- 
ter men than they. 

" A sower went forth to sow." " The King- 
dom of Heaven is seed." "I have many things 
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them 
now. When the Spirit of Truth is come, He 
will guide you into all truth." " For this cause 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 69 

was I born, for this cause came I into the 
world, that I should bear witness to the truth. 
Every one that is of the truth heareth my 
voice." So spake the Son of man. Clear as is 
his vision of the truth men need, he claims 
for that vision no finality. There are things 
he does not know. There are questions he will 
not attempt to answer. He has no creed to 
offer men. He is a sower sent from God to 
sow seed — seed that he is confident will grow 
to a vast harvest, will spread as yeast spreads 
in the flour. 

My friends, these are Christian common- 
places that need to be repeated to-day. They 
have been too often forgotten and ignored. 
This Jesus has no sacred vessel ready to con- 
tain and protect the precious seed of the truth 
that he sees and sows. Its life and future de- 
pend on its own divine vitality and the fitted- 
ness of the soil into which it falls. He is no 
ecclesiastic. The vision of the truth that he 
saw, the things he said about men and about 
God, were living seeds, indeed. They fell, they 
rooted themselves, they grew to beauty and 



70 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

to harvest. They affected men profoundly. 
They came to be held as God's most precious 
gift to man, his child'; and since this was 
so, human love and faith could do no less 
than surround its treasure with the fairest 
treasury wealth could supply, or art plan, 
and so yet once again, as history repeats 
itself, were laid the foundations of the mighty 
ecclesiastical structures of the past: some of 
them great and old, venerable and beautiful 
beyond words to the artist's eye, and some 
very modern and absurd ; Roman and Grecian, 
Anglican and Presbyterian, and " isms " in- 
numerable. Pots, pots, and again pots. The old 
story of the pot. The best poor human love, 
faith, and wit could do, with the things it had 
at hand, to deck and preserve the holy seed 
it would give, and often did give, its very 
life for ; yet one and all of them, the ancient 
and beautiful, or modern and grotesque, 
doomed in the very nature of things to disuse 
and decay. 

For each age, God-hungry, turns from the 
flesh-pots of its Egypt to the best idea of God 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 71 

it can win, and following that idea, so is led 
through its own wilderness, follows its own 
pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by 
night, wrestles with its plagues, beats back its 
enemies, and spite of all its losses, struggles, 
struggles onward, towards the distant Canaan 
where it would be. Each age leaves to the 
future the story of its struggle, the precious 
symbols of its victories, the battle standards 
round which its hopes and beliefs rallied, and 
made good their stand. 

• But old banners that were waved in the 
victories of long ago may lead us to defeat 
to-day. The brazen serpent that was the sym- 
bol and guarantee of divine deliverance to 
one generation may become the accursed idol 
of the next. It is the duty of Moses to hold 
it aloft. No less it is the duty of Joshua to 
grind it to powder. For, ah ! the ideals of one 
generation do often become the idols of the 
next — poor plaster casts of God, fit only to 
be broken and thrown away. 

Do not let me be misunderstood. I am not 
denying the need, in their proper place, of 



72 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

all those religious constructions that grew, 
and grow of necessity, round any and all 
precious truth-winnings of mankind, useful 
and necessary for a time in giving expression 
to man's most vital part, his religious instinct; 
needful as are all bodies to house temporarily 
all souls, but not to be regarded by any means 
as complete and final expressions of the soul 
of truth they temporarily protect, or of the 
divine life they partially express and explain. 
No; I would but emphasize again the fact 
that, while creeds, dogmas, sacred writings, 
religious ordinances, etc., may be locally and 
temporarily of great importance, they are at 
best but pots, whose sole use is to protect the 
seed of life; blundering, imperfect attempts 
in terms of the finite to explain the Infinite. 
They are not, however venerable, of the na- 
ture of the seed itself. Truth needs them, and 
outgroios them; seeking ever newer forms, 
which again in their turn must inevitably be 
outgrown. 

We see through a glass darkly; we see in 
no other way. We know in part, and the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 73 

wisest and best, not even the Master himself, 
have ever known or seen in any other way. 
For if there is a God at all, he certainly is In- 
finite, and we, though we be his real children, 
sparks cast forth by the sun of his being, 
know ourselves sadly to be finite and limited, 
indeed. 

In Jesus I believe the Infinite drew as near 
to man as Infinity might draw to finitude. I 
mean by that that our race may never hope 
to see any one more full of God, more truly 
divine, than was the man, Christ Jesus. And 
if this be true, then in Jesus' life and teach- 
ing and character, seen and studied rationally, 
must be found all that manhood in its best 
flower can in its present stage of being know 
or reveal of God. 

I think a study of Jesus leads to such a 
conclusion. This undoubtedly was Jesus' own 
view of his person and mission. He believed 
that the age-long conviction, so firmly em- 
bedded in his race, was divinely implanted ; 
that in the changing phases of its existence 
his nation had guarded, held in trust for man- 



74 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

kind, a revelation of the one true God and 
Father of all; that tribal life and tabernacle 
worship, and then temple and statelier ritual, 
all expressed God, all were aids — crutches, 
as it were, to help lame humanity to God; 
that Jewish poets and prophets spake as they 
were moved by the same everlasting Holy 
Spirit, that more fully, more humanly, more 
intimately, spake in him; and that when his 
work should have been accomplished, that 
same eternal voice would surely continue to 
guide into a clearer daylight the steps of men 
whose wills were right with God. 

In this sense, then, Jesus himself was care- 
ful not to claim finality for his teaching. 
There he differed from other great religious 
reformers. He was a sower of seed. He gave 
men a living principle, not a golden brick. 
Nay, he himself was but a seed cast into the 
ground, and his dying was, in his view, neces- 
sary, "for unless seed fall into the ground and 
die, it remaineth alone." 

I venture to think that this teaching of 
the Son of man has never received, at the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 75 

churches' hands, the recognition its profound 
importance deserves. It is the quality of ex- 
pansiveness in it, the capacity to change, to 
grow with man's growing life, which consti- 
tutes its profound reasonableness. 

Other religions have done vast good for a 
time. But they have been locally adapted, and 
so, having met the needs of a certain race or 
certain epoch only, with that race or epoch 
they were doomed to decay. But this Gospel 
of the Son of man, this Gospel of the seed, 
is an expanding gospel, sure to grow and ad- 
vance with the life of the race which it both 
comforts and explains — sure in time to be- 
come actually what it claims to be, the religion 
of the wide world. 



76 THE REASONABLENESS OF 



III 

JESUS' DOCTRINE OF THE SEED (cOJltinued) 

Jesus said, " So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should 
cast seed into the ground ; . . . and the seed should spring and 
grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth 
fruit of herself." — Mark iv, 2G-28. 

One of the commonest and most misleading 
mistakes made by that multitude of good 
Christian people, who have had no time or in- 
clination seriously to study the religion they 
heartily accept, is that of supposing that the 
Christianity they, without much thought, have 
accepted, has come to them practically un- 
changed from the earliest days, — that the 
doctrines they hold were always held by be- 
lievers — were held as they hold them to-day, 
— that in defending these, in protesting against 
any change in them, they are standing for 
the truth ; and that those who advocate re- 
statement are bent on destroying the fabric 
of the faith. Of course this is far from the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 77 

truth. Practically universal scholarship admits 
to-day that orthodox Christianity has under- 
gone quite extraordinary transformations. I 
have pointed out this fact to you before. I 
must still at some length insist on it, for 
to forget it, to deny it, must lead to endless 
confusion, misunderstanding, and error. 

As a matter of fact, those who advocate 
change are often most truly conservative. 
They are seeking only to draw the faith and 
hope of their fellows back to those higher 
standards, the truer concepts of an earlier day 
— are actually imitating Jesus himself. For 
what did Jesus do ? He set himself to rescue 
from its mistaken guardians and teachers 
the truth his Heavenly Father had given to 
men; that revelation had been covered out 
of sight, made of none effect through their 
added traditions, perverted by their sophistry, 
denied and falsified by their custom, till in 
their keeping the house of God had indeed 
become a den of thieves. 

After the Master's death — when Pentecost's 
power was on them — the twelve disciples 



78 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

and their company went everywhere preaching 
his word. Signs and wonders were wrought 
by them in his name. They literally accom- 
plished in a day what in all his ministry he 
had failed to accomplish. Thousands be- 
lieved and went forth to life's tasks, rejoicing 
in a new hope, where before a little company 
had but doubtingly followed. 

But this first band of saved and inspired 
men had their own work to do. It was to 
preach. They were not historians. The needs 
of the far future were not visible to them. 
The immediate present was their care. They 
spoke, they toiled, but they did not write. 
They were not fitted for writing. 

There were others — their followers — who 
had learned at second-hand from them about 
Jesus. These naturally began to make some 
record of the gospel story, and on their every 
page the divine glow of a vital inspiration 
forever remains. There were still others, such 
as the unknown authors of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, or of the Apocalypse, whose evident 
inspiration is of almost as high an order as 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 79 

that of their teachers themselves. Who can 
deny the height and glory of the spiritual 
standard they attain? We know not their 
names, yet the very fact that such writings 
and several others by unknown hands should 
have survived to our time, and should have 
won a deserved place in the canon, proves 
conclusively how wonderful was the spiritual 
life and enthusiasm Jesus breathed into the 
hearts of those men who companioned with 
him during his ministry, or who came later 
under the immediate influence of those who 
had done so. The divine glow was, indeed, 
wonderful, but it was brief. 

There can be no possible doubt in our minds 
as to what Jesus' message was as we read the 
Synoptic Gospels, or the writings of Paul, or 
even as we study the Johannine philosophy 
that based itself on that message. Differences 
of interpretation are already evident, of course, 
even among these earliest witnesses, but only 
such differences as witness most naturally to 
the spiritual honesty that filled them all. 

But soon there was a change, and before 



80 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

three centuries had passed, change had given 
way to transformation. The emphasis was no 
longer on what the Master taught. The church 
that called itself by his name was feeling its 
way toward the assertion of claims that he 
denied, and that his apostles abhorred. 

He and they had pleaded with men to walk 
as children of God. But to walk as children 
of God was soon to mean a totally different 
thing — namely, to walk in obedience to an 
ecclesiastical authority. He had no thought of 
creed, but now the greatest metaphysicians of 
that or of any age bent their Grecian genius 
to the formulating of a vast literature of 
dogma, which only the learned could under- 
stand, but which all were enjoined to receive. 

Next we see arise a Militant Papacy, steadily 
replacing the free and simple idealism of 
Jesus by its "imperial, ecclesiastical, paternal, 
benevolent tyranny." "My kingdom is not of 
this world," said the dying Christ. " Nay, but 
in thy high name I claim and take the king- 
doms of this world," cried ever victorious 
Rome. And long centuries were to pass be- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 81 

fore this falsest of all claims made on behalf 
of the Christian religion was, in the name of 
the common rights of man, repudiated. Alas ! 
even yet Rome's fatal insistence on it has 
distracted France, and numbs and blights 
religious life in Catholic Europe. 

No, indeed, the religion that is ours bears 
everywhere the marks of inevitable change and 
growth ; whether for evil or for good, whether 
our judgment approves these changes or no, 
let us recognize them. Especially let us, who 
are Americans, remember that Protestantism, 
in some branch of which most of us have been 
brought up, is responsible for its full share 
of changes wrought. The fact that it made a 
sacred book its oracle, when it refused obed- 
ience to the Roman primacy, could not save 
the Protestant movement from the law of 
growth and change. Protestantism had to be. 
It was the legitimate child of the Renaissance. 
The flush of new light, the tide of new learn- 
ing that swept over the Western world, re- 
sulted in the breaking of all manner of sacred 
" pots," the bursting of venerable wine-skins. 



82 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Protestantism saw clearly enough that the 
true throne of the Father God must be the 
mind of man ; that the final seal of divine au- 
thority could be nowhere else than in the 
mind of man. Protestantism was, on its spir- 
itual side at least (and it had other sides), the 
re-assertion — almost the re-discovery — of 
the very core of Jesus' gospel. " Verily I say 
to you the hour cometh when neither in this 
mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall ye wor- 
ship the Father. God is a spirit, and they that 
worship him must worship him in spirit and 
in truth. For the Father seeketh such to wor- 
ship him." It therefore put the pope and the 
priest in their right place. Temples, to the 
Protestant, were but pictures of the temple 
of the universe ; sacrifices, but symbols of the 
divine order of the world ; priests, but human 
tokens of, and witnesses to, what man's life 
of glad service was meant to be. 

At least logically Protestantism should have 
held this ground. But the long custom of the 
ages was too much for it. The movement 
dared not trust itself to the impulse and direc- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 83 

tion of the Divine Spirit. It too sought to 
establish a final court of religious appeal other 
than Christ had established. Rome had proved 
herself self-seeking and false — a blind leader 
of the blind. Western civilization turned from 
her to the sacred writings, rejected her absolut- 
ism, and created a new absolutism of the Bible. 

It is hard to see what other course the re- 
formers of the sixteenth century could have 
pursued. All Christendom had been trained 
to believe that the Bible was a verbally in- 
spired book. Those who parted company with 
Rome rejected her interpretation of it, de- 
nounced her for her denial of the book to the 
laity, for her sophistifications, misrepresenta- 
tions, and perversions of its plainest teachings. 
But of its value and its authority they were 
fully convinced. 

Neither had Protestants grasped the mighty 
doctrine of the " seed." The law of change, 
of expansion, of growth, had been rendered 
odious to them, since Rome had abused it to 
crush freedom and enslave the human mind. 
The one desire of her best leaders was to get 



84 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

back to where the early Church had been; to 
sit at the Master's feet ; to stand, clothed with 
Pentecost's persuading, inspiring power, by 
his empty grave. 

Who to-day shall deny the essential nobil- 
ity of that ideal? It gave new hope to men 
of courage and learning. It consecrated the 
cradle of the modern spirit. It baptized science 
into the name of Jesus. And yet I think all 
will admit that Protestantism, as a final ex- 
pression of Christ's religion, has failed. It had 
its day. It did its work, just as well, and no 
better than have other religious movements. 
It was the best thing men saw at the time. It 
expressed the highest, the truest they knew, 
but in its bosom it carried the seeds of its own 
decay. The ultimate appeal was to a sacred 
book, and a book — no matter how wonderful 
— is no living thing. It can but express the 
ideas of the men who wrote it. It must bear 
everywhere the marks of human finality and 
limitation. The mind of man refuses to be 
bound. It ranges the universe ; lifts itself to 
the stars ; is ever hungry for God ; seeks him 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 85 

in the present ; hopes for him in the future ; 
rightly refuses any creed that binds it to the 
past. If he is, he is self-revealing. If we are 
his children, then to us he must speak. He 
spoke to our fathers, and in his spoken word 
to them we rejoice ; but their wanderings are 
over — ours are but begun. Their questions 
are answered ; ours press sorely on us for an- 
swer. A God truly to help in time of need 
must ever inspire and help that time. A living 
age demands a living God, and if it revolts 
from the false leadership of a Roman priest 
who has proved to reasonable men that he has 
made the truth of God of none effect to them 
by his traditions, it cannot (let it try never so 
patiently) find the satisfaction and guidance 
it needs in the pages of a book, however sa- 
cred, the records of a literature, however glori- 
ous. 

Here was the Protestant quandary. Rome 
had adopted the right idea. Rome had always 
set herself to expand; had changed with the 
changing times; and had during the dark 
centuries been a rallying-point against despair, 



86 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

and an immense power for good in the world. 
She had truly declared that the voice of God 
must ever be a living voice — God speaking 
through living men. So far, and in principle, 
she was evolutionary; she had the ages on her 
side; she was right. Her error lay not in her 
theory, but in her practice. Popular Protest- 
antism confounded these two, and, moved by 
a not unreasonable wrath against what Rome 
had accomplished, set aside as mistaken both 
her theory and her practice. I say moved by 
a not unreasonable wrath, for remember, the 
Reformation movement in Germany, in Switz- 
erland, and in England, was largely influenced 
by men smarting under a sense of bitter 
wrong. The awful Christlessness of Rome's 
practice naturally led the revolting people to 
abhor and refuse the precepts by which she 
had justified it. 

Here let me digress for a moment. Mark 
you, my friends, this protest against the ways 
of Rome is no outworn protest that has lost 
its meaning and its vigor because the protesters 
who voiced the great revolt of Reformation 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 87 

times made many and great mistakes them- 
selves, and were succeeded by others who added 
crime to mistake. No, with new insistence, 
backed by new witnesses, it is sure to rise 
and rise again. History is opening its half- 
forgotten, partially understood page to the 
modern scholar, and the verdict of history on 
Rome's ways and policies, past and present, 
cannot be mistaken, cannot be ignored. Where 
she has had power undivided, unchecked, she 
has crushed out liberty and truth, she has set 
back civilization, she has refused the very 
bread of life to her most faithful children. 
The awful story of her doings in Spain is yet 
but partially known, 1 but age-long betrayal 
of the great French people is beginning to be 
understood in France, though it is not yet 
appreciated outside its borders. 

1 In 1522, the year in which Luther was summoned to the 
Diet of Worms, Ignatius Loyola published the only book he 
ever wrote, his Spiritual Exercises. The book was intended as 
a devotional guide for those who would enter his order of the 
Society of Jesus. In the concluding rules of the exercise, 
Loyola says : " Laying aside all private judgment, we ought 
to obey in all things the Hierarchical Church ; to praise con- 
fession, to praise the frequent hearing of the mass, to praise 



88 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Kome betrayed, oppressed, and slaughtered, 
for five hundred long years, the Puritans of 
France, and France was the cradle of Puritan- 
ism. Three hundred years before English 
Wycliffe preached and printed, Puritanism 
had its birth in Southern France. Like all 
great movements, it had its faults, its excesses, 
its limitations. But making full allowance for 
them all, Puritanism in France and anywhere 
else mightily strove for those invaluable human 
rights and duties, in the exercise of which alone 
do nations rise to greatness and men ripen to 
character. 

Eome set herself to stamp into the soil 
whence it sprang, this most vital seed of pro- 
gress. She was not strong enough to do it 

the religious orders and the vows of religion, to praise the 
relics of saints, to praise the fasts and penances, to praise 
the buildings and ornaments, always to defend, and never 
to impugn, the precepts of the Church, to approve the 
constitutions, recommendations, and habits of life of our 
superiors, whether praiseworthy or not, for to speak against 
them before the lower classes would give rise to mur- 
murs and scandal, and thus the people would be irritated 
against their temporal or spiritual rulers ; to praise scholas- 
tic theology, to hold that we believe what seems to us white to 
be black, if the Hierarchical Church so defines it." This was 
Jesuitry, and it ruined Spain. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 89 

alone, and cunningly she set herself to wheedle 
and seduce the Kings of France to aid in the 
crusade. The scattered political units that 
were to make the great French nation of the 
future had not yet been welded to unity. She 
would help the central power to an absolute 
dominion, on the condition that Puritan heresy 
was utterly destroyed. And so the knife of the 
butcher was blessed by the vice-regent of God, 
and bloody work began that was to go on, 
with slight intermission, for almost five hun- 
dred years, till the final blow, the revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes, fell. If the secular 
powers of France sickened, as they often did, 
of the job, Rome stood ever ready, lending 
her superb ecclesiastical machinery to aid the 
crown in the consolidation of its powers; lift- 
ing the throne of France to a yet more auto- 
cratic authority. 

This devil's work, as I say, went on for 
centuries, while slowly the best life-blood of a 
great nation was drained away. Europe, fully 
occupied with its own affairs, dominated by 
the Papacy, did not interfere. It was easy to 



90 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

pervert the issue and disarm such weak and 
ineffectual sympathy as might arise outside the 
French border. So at last Rome was supreme, 
the French kings could debauch France and 
plunder her at their will ; and Puritanism died 
in the breach or at the stake, or went over-seas, 
to help make rival nations such as England 
and Holland great, and, in time, America free. 

Then at last retribution came. Those forces, 
making for all that moderation and constitu- 
tionalism mean, had been forbidden place in 
France, and France herself must pay the price. 
Innocent and guilty — that is the law — must 
suffer together, and red revolution must write, 
with dripping finger, on the fairest churches 
piety had ever raised to the worship of God, 
Christianity's own forgotten motto, that since 
1170 had in France been denied and blas- 
phemed — Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. Ah, 
yes, and the end is not yet. 

These doings of Rome meant a great deal 
to the fathers of the Reformation. The mis- 
take they made was natural, but for Protestant- 
ism it was a fatal mistake. It rejected Roman 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 91 

authority. It denied that any man or group of 
men were alone and before all others ordained 
and empowered to express and proclaim the 
very truth of Eternal God, were his vice-re- 
gents on earth. It was high time to protest 
against the leadership of Rome. Popery had 
proved itself a false leader, a blind guide. 
The Vatican had failed the cause of truth, 
had suppressed and strangled the seed, as 
effectually as had the Pharisees and scribes 
of our Lord's day. And the crime was of 
deeper dye than theirs, for heavily and darkly 
her hands were stained with blood. The time 
for protest was, indeed, fully come. But it was 
a grave mistake for those great protesters to 
seek to place the Bible in the Vatican's place. 
Once the Protestant leaders had definitely 
broken with Rome, they in their turn found 
themselves confronted with the age-long prob- 
lem that no religious organization had ever 
solved. They must recast the truth as they 
saw it, for the new time ; strip its teachings of 
gloss and sophistry, and sow a fresh, pure 
seed, give forth fresh, wholesome bread for 



92 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

the food of man. What Buddhist priest, Jew- 
ish scribe, Roman council had failed to do, 
Protestant synods in their turn must attempt. 
They of course failed, but who shall wonder 
at their failure. It was failure to recognize and 
heartily accept the essential nature of Christ's 
doctrine of the seed — the evolutionary na- 
ture of the truth. 

Protestantism does not need here, or from 
me, defence or vindication. What is good in 
us, what is of final value in our institutions, 
is largely owing to what its great leaders and 
martyrs thought, did, and suffered, and we are 
not likely to forget it or be ashamed to own 
our debt. But to pretend that as a religious 
system, acceptable to thoughtful men, it sat- 
isfies our needs, answers our questions, or pro- 
mises a reasonable guidance for the future, I 
think very few are prepared to do. In our dis- 
satisfaction with the religious aspects of Pro- 
testant churches to-day, let us at least ever 
keep before our eyes the fact of the greatness 
of our debt to that world movement from 
which they sprang. Those men of the six- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 93 

teenth century relit the torch of truth when it 
was well-nigh quenched in the thick darkness. 
Where they held their own, first in the school 
and university, and then on bloody battle-field, 
the seed grew. Liberty and civilization took 
root, and the nations prospered. Where they 
failed partially, progress was at least retarded, 
and came slowly, if it came at all. Where they 
were slaughtered, where in tens of thousands 
they were burned, as in Spain, darkness and 
tyranny took up their abode. Men gave up 
hope then, and are giving up God now. 

Some who have kindly listened to me so far 
may say that I have unduly emphasized man's 
religious failure to attain any standard ap- 
proaching that which Jesus established. Let 
me try to make clear that such has not been 
my intention. I hold, on the, other hand, that 
we are all too much inclined to undervalue the 
progress that has been made towards his ideal, 
in the religious life that has been won ; that 
we dwell with too faint a heart on the spec- 
tacle of moral failure and hesitating advance. 



94 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

On the whole, man's religious sense grows and 
does not decay. 

For like a child sent with a flickering light 
To find his way across a dusky night, 

Man walks the world. 
Again and yet again, the lamp must be by gusts of pas- 
sion slain. 
But shall not He that sent him from the door 
Relight the lamp once more and yet once more ? 

But the path of religious progress is ever 
a zigzag path. It has never been in the nature 
of a straight line. We are quicker to see our 
forefathers' crimes than their virtues, because 
our own heightened sense of moral obligation 
prevents often a fair comparison between our 
moral standards and theirs, while the dimness 
and imperfection of our best historic knowledge 
prevents our valuing, as we should, the ideals 
they strove to attain. Their best may not have 
been what seems to us best. What seemed to 
them reasonable, the means they took to reach 
it, we may think mistaken or immoral. But 
surely this is often because we fail to put 
ourselves back in those remote times. Had we 
been where and what they were, we should 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 95 

have done as they. In all ages since man 
became a religious being, he has on the whole 
striven to give the best he has to the best he 
hioios, and I know no better definition of 
religion than that. 

Of course we must admit that "the best 
men knew " often differed not only in degree, 
but in kind, from the Gospel of Jesus ; that 
its identification with that gospel made Christ's 
message temporarily of none effect to man ; 
nay, that often its mistaken professors used 
their perverted Christian ideas to accomplish 
ends, to justify means, abhorrent to the Mas- 
ter. So much is undoubtedly true. Yet since into 
the mind of man the seed of the kingdom had 
fallen, — fallen, as the great Seedsman said, 
often seemingly in vain, fallen on rock and thorn 
and highway, yet fallen, too, here and there 
on good ground, — through all the changes 
and chances of our mortal life, it must ever 
somewhere spring. In the wide field of hu- 
manity it must appear and reappear, for he 
who sowed said its destiny was to live and 
never altogether to die, 



96 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

I am persuaded that we must grasp this 
sublime truth to-day if we are to go forth to 
life's tasks in a spirit of joy and confidence, 
and not of doubt or despair. What warrant 
have we for believing that in this, our half- 
instructed time, we can know anything approx- 
imating to all the truth about Jesus or his 
nature or his message that is yet to be known ? 
Why should we imagine that we can do what 
no generation before us has done — free our- 
selves from our prejudices and our selfish- 
nesses, and so yield a completely intelligent 
and perfect obedience to the divine Son of 
man? To fancy for a moment that such a 
service is possible to us would be to convict 
ourselves of blindest Phariseeism ; would be to 
claim for ourselves a singleness of eye, a pur- 
ity of vision that no inspired apostle dared to 
claim. No ; at best we can but hope, with good 
intention, to give to him who is altogether 
worthy, who is indeed the incarnation and sum- 
ming-up of the highest we know, the poor 
best that is ours to give. 

I have dwelt on the past, because imperfect 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 97 

as is our knowledge of it such knowledge 
surely tends to comfort and encourage us and 
not to depress. If we are uncertain and doubt- 
ful of many things, the great ones that strove 
before us were at least as uncertain, and where 
they cast aside all uncertainty, they were often 
farthest from the truth. When they were 
most positive they were often most wrong. 
Yet the sum total of it all makes, and has 
made, for good. 

It is not so long ago since the fashion of 
an hour denounced Christianity, denied the 
good of religion, on the ground that many 
of the monstrous crimes of the past — its 
tyrannies, its blood-shedding — were done in 
its name. Historic science to-day admits the 
facts, but repudiates the conclusions drawn 
from them. 

Cruel and tyrannous men there have been, 
there will yet be, for human nature rises but 
slowly from the original beast. But the gentle- 
ness, the holiness, the sublime wisdom and 
self-sacrifice of the religion of Jesus has in 
darkest times modified the beast in man, even 



98 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

where it has been powerless to eradicate it. 
And so to go back to my definition of religion. 
So long as even the beast, at times, felt he 
should bring the best within him to the best 
that was far above him, he was the less a bad 
man, the less tyrannous neighbor, for even the 
temporary effort. 

Jesus set the standard, and to the standard 
all good men have repaired and will repair. 
Yes ; so far as Christendom's past is visible to 
us, we can see its greatest personalities so com- 
ing. We can sometimes note their mistakes. 
We can guess at least at the temporary or 
permanent value of the offerings they bring, 
the additions they make to the treasure house 
of their God. 

Even a cursory glance, then, at religious 
history is enough to make it evident that the 
Christian doctrines most of us were brought 
up to believe without question have undergone 
constant and radical change; that our religion 
as we received it from our fathers was a very 
different thing from the religion Jesus sought 
to teach his disciples, and which they in their 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 99 

turn sowed among men. When we reject parts 
of it, when we try to make our own additions 
to it, when we seek to conform it to what 
this new day has brought us of truth, we are 
only doing what all good men have done be- 
fore us — we are honoring and not dishonor- 
ing the gospel we love; we are following our 
great Master in the very way he hade us fol- 
low him; we are doing just what he told us 
to do, trusting to the light and help of the 
Spirit, whose inspiring guidance he promised 
should not fail humanity till the end of the 
ages. 

Now, further, I want to remind you that 
this process of growth and change is already 
unmistakably present in the earliest years of 
the first century. Many learned writers have 
pointed this out. I only briefly refer to it as 
a quite unanswerable evidence of the accept- 
ance, sometimes it may be unconscious, by the 
greatest of the early Christian teachers, of 
Jesus' doctrine of the seed. 

Even a casual reader of the Bible cannot 
fail to notice the difference between the writ- 



100 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ings of Paul and the recorded sayings of Jesus. 
Without contradiction we may claim the Apos- 
tle to the Gentiles as the greatest re-sower of 
the seed in the first century. Where did Paul 
get his doctrine? Some have supposed that he 
received from the apostles instruction in the 
teachings of Jesus, and from these developed 
his system. Paul himself denies this. He ex- 
plicitly disclaims any such proceeding. "I 
certify you, brethren, that the gospel which 
was preached of me is not after man. For I 
neither received it of man, neither was I 
taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus 
Christ." * So confident was he of his own in- 
spiration that he even withstood Peter, claim- 
ing that his own teaching and practice on an 
important question was after the mind of 
Christ, and that the elder apostle had yielded 
sinfully to the legalists. Whether Paul was 
right or wrong in his contention is of but 
secondary importance. What is of quite first 
importance is the ground he took in defending 
his position. It was that the gospel was so liv- 

1 See Gal. I, 11 and 12. 



THE KELIGION OF JESUS 101 

ing, so comprehensive that all men seeking the 
truth, Gentiles as well as Jews, had in it equal 
part. The fact that Jesus himself had confined 
his mission to the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel does not seem to have caused the Apos- 
tle to the Gentiles any hesitation in throwing 
wide the doors of the early Church to the 
world. He was right. He was truly inspired. 
But his was the inspiration of a radical, of 
an evolutionist. 

So in his slowly formulated doctrines of 
justification by faith, of sacrifice, and of atone- 
ment, Paul is bent on welding together rab- 
binical thinking and Jewish law, in which his 
whole mind is steeped, with the teachings of 
his new-found Master, to whom his whole 
heart is given. Before all things, he is im- 
pressed with Jesus' attitude to the past. " I am 
not come to destroy the law and the prophets, 
but to fulfil." And so plainly before him 
rises his lifework. What can Paul do better 
than explain the old sacrificial system of the 
Jews as fulfilled in the dying of the Saviour ? 

St. Paul's aim was a true aim. He gave the 



102 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

best he had to the best he knew, and for long 
centuries a great part of Christendom was 
destined to take his teachings as the final word. 
But new light has come with new times. 
Sacrifice, as the law of our universe, means a 
wider, deeper, more universal thing to-day than 
it ever did before. Atonement, substitution, 
justification are no longer the burning ques- 
tions that once they were, and this lonely little 
man, who stamped our religion with his tre- 
mendous personality, as none but the Master 
ever did, cannot help us to-day as that Mas- 
ter himself can help. So much may be admit- 
ted, yet never can we over-pay the debt we 
owe to St. Paul. The universal law of sacri- 
fice which Jesus taught and illustrated is a far 
higher law than the Pauline conception of 
it, but Paul's genius gave to his own and 
to succeeding times the clearest and highest 
rendering of that law which men could then 
understand. And yet the living seed must in 
time outgrow and crack all pots — even the 
apostolic pots ; even the Pauline pot. 

After Paul's day men went everywhere 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 103 

sowing the word, and the seed fell on Grecian 
ground, and Grecian metaphysician and philo- 
sopher received it gladly. With them, too, 
it sprang up and bore fruit. They must give 
the best they had to this last, best life that 
had come to them. For centuries, then, the 
supremest creed-makers who ever lived had 
their way. In terms of human reason they set 
themselves to explain the Infinite, to justify 
the ways of God to men. The task they set 
themselves was an impossible task, yet could 
they have attempted no other, for for it they 
were supremely fitted. Of this much I think 
we may be sure ; where they gloriously failed, 
none may ever hope to succeed. The great 
creed -makers had their day. They spared 
neither themselves nor those who differed from 
them. They help us to know rather what the 
Christianity of the future cannot be than 
what it can be. 

Then it was the turn of the practical men 
of the world to shape the new religion to 
practical ends. As Roman power trembled to 
its fall, men who had come to regard Roman 



104 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

law and rule as the world's only safeguards 
against anarchy looked on all sides to find some 
shelter from the coming storm. The hordes 
that threatened from across the frontier had 
been largely Christianized ; why was it not then 
possible to bind the mistress of the nations 
and her younger rebellious children together, 
by a kindlier and more enduring tie than any 
which Roman despotism had ever conceived 
of ? It teas a grand dream. 

And so arose the idea of the universal Ro- 
man Church, paramount to all temporal power. 
The Lex Romana had held civilization to- 
gether for so long, men had grown so accus- 
tomed to one central power, that any division 
of ultimate authority seemed well-nigh impos- 
sible. If under an inferior law, if subject to an 
often brutal code, human progress had been so 
marked and general peace and prosperity had 
proved so stable, to what high ends might not 
mankind attain if the vicar of Christ ascended 
the throne of the Caesars, and councils of holy 
bishops met to decide between nation and na- 
tion ? Thus came temporal power to the Central 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 105 

Roman See — not so much a thing grasped at 
by any pontiff as a duty forced on the Church 
by the dire needs of a distracted time. 

Again good men brought the best they had 
to the best they knew. And had they done 
otherwise, the dark ages that followed would 
probably have been darker than they were. 

Let me refer to one movement in those 
dark ages that very plainly illustrates the 
truth I would press on you — the Crusades. 
That these caused much blood-shedding can- 
not be denied. They were of their time, and 
the times were superstitious and cruel. The 
Sepulchre was sacred. The spirit of him who 
rose from it was often denied or unknown. 
Yet surely it was better far that the feudal 
tyrant should believe that there was some- 
thing worth dying for besides his ill-gotten 
hoard, and that that sacred thing was the 
cradle of his religion, than that he should 
stay at home, to wage ceaseless war on his 
neighbors. 

Practically the crusader may have been 
often little better than a heathen knight who 



106 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

worshipped his own bloody sword. Yet when 
he raised aloft its iron hilt, and on its crude 
cross swore the oath that bound him to 
long exile and often to death, he was on 
the way to be a better man, and he certainly 
was destined, though he knew it not, to bring 
back to Europe the seeds of enlightenment and 
learning. By taking the cross, unwittingly he 
accomplished a greater thing than he aimed 
at when he would have wrested the Sepulchre 
from the Saracen. He brought East and West 
together, opened new ways for commerce and 
for learning, and incidentally the worst of 
his band helped the future by laying down 
their lives to uphold the past. 

The crusader knew nothing of the spirit of 
pity or toleration. We, to whom toleration is 
a commonplace, forget how slowly it spread 
among men, forget how long and dark were 
the ages during which even to the saintly it 
was almost unknown. Though he was of his 
time and lacked pity, the crusader was often 
truly and profoundly religious. Simon de 
Montfort, leader of the wholly unjust crusade 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 107 

against the French Puritan Albigenses in 
1220, is busy slaughtering the heretics, men, 
women, and children. Before leading an as- 
sault on an Albigensian stronghold, he ac- 
cording to custom will attend mass. As the 
mailed knight kneels in prayer, a squire rushes 
to his side and hurriedly whispers that a des- 
perate sortie has been made by the garrison, 
and that the immense wooden machinery of 
his attack is in imminent danger of total de- 
struction. He must come at once, or all will 
be lost. Still kneeling, unmoved, the iron- 
headed man replies, " I cannot come till I have 
looked on my Christ." Here is the crusading 
spirit, perhaps, at its best. It knows nothing 
of pity ; to it toleration is a sin ; but even the 
cruel devastator's religion is the giving of the 
best he has to the best he knows. His cross 
is a sword hilt, but it is a real cross all the 
same. 

Yes ; each age marks and moulds the seed 
truth as it sees it, marks it after its own like- 
ness, till to our eyes often all the beauty and 
worth of it are lost. But it is not so. For lo, 



108 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

in some mysterious way the very next age finds 
some new expression for it, sees a new hope, 
follows a new light. The seed is not dead, but, 
as the Master foretold, has been re-sown. The 
soil and climate condition the growth of the 
seed ; they do not create it. Its innermost life 
is a thing apart from them. It uses them rather 
than they it. The inner vitality of the God 
seed in us all is the insoluble mystery and 
glory of life. 

It would be interesting and instructive to 
follow further this line of thought; to point 
out how, in each successive movement of hu- 
man advance since the days of St. Paul, the 
ideals that dominated men, whether intellect- 
ual or political, profoundly controlled and al- 
tered their creeds. As, for instance, the grand 
dream of the temporal power faded, as success- 
ive pontiffs proved themselves no better rulers 
than the emperors had been, man's irrepress- 
ible faith again fixes its eye on the throne. In 
it surely dwelt something of a divine right, and 
the brave souls that rallied to defend its lost 
cause, against the rising tide of Puritan de- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 109 

mocracy, fought as much for a religious as for 
a political faith. 

So down to our own time. Many who long 
ago cast aside as an ancient fable the belief 
in the divine right of kings to rule, still stoutly 
hold to their fathers' confidence in the divine 
right of priests to mediate : one doctrine as vis- 
ionary as the other. Both of them are but 
shadowy hints of the great truths behind them, 
namely, the divine right of man to rule him- 
self, and his equally divine right to come to 
God for himself. At infinite cost these have 
been won. But the understanding and appli- 
cation of them to character and society is not 
yet. 

Meanwhile to each is given as much truth 
as he can take — to each age as much light as 
it can obey. 

Is not the wide air, after the cocoon, 

As much God as the moth-soul can receive ? 

Doth not God give the child within the womb 
Some guess to set him groping for the world, 
Some blurred reflection answering his desire ? 

We, shut in this blue womb of the doming sky, 
Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God, 



110 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense, 
Strive for a sign of what it is to see. 

Christ's doctrine, then, as we know and pro- 
fess it, has not come to us without enduring 
many and radical changes, and can only re- 
main a vital and real thing to us by reason of 
more and continuous change. If in the first 
instance it was miraculously given (and I do 
not say it was, for here I use the word " mir- 
aculous " in its scientific sense), it certainly 
was not miraculously preserved. When Jesus 
had spoken of what was to follow his sowing, 
he seems carefully to avoid the idea that any 
specially miraculous interference was to be ex- 
pected or desired on that seed's behalf. Some 
was to fall on good ground, and greatly suc- 
ceed. Some was to be almost choked to death 
by worldly influences. And yet some more was 
quite to fail — evil birds were to carry it away. 
Then he adds that its growing depended on 
and was nourished by the normal influences 
of the earth receiving it : earth, that makes 
things grow " we know not how." Such was 
the Master's forecast, and has not history ab- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 111 

solutely fulfilled it? Things have but fallen 
out as he foreknew. For all the changes that 
have passed on it, his word is still the very 
seed of life to us to-day ; our guide to duty- 
doing here, our hope for large worthiness else- 
where. Firmly, reasonably, I think, we may 
believe that more, and not less, of Jesus Christ 
is visible to men to-day. We are nearer him, 
we see him — not clearly, it is true, but less 
indistinctly than those of bygone times. In 
spite of all the intervening ages, in spite of all 
the inevitable confusions and distortions of 
human thinking, though strange claims have 
been made for him and terrible deeds done in 
his holy name, still the real man, Christ Jesus, 
remains " the chief among ten thousand and 
the altogether lovely." 

Human thought has perhaps concentrated 
itself on him, more than on all the other sons of 
men put together. Sometimes it has ignored 
him, but not for long ; next it has acclaimed 
him; but whether from the coverings of ne- 
glect or the robes of royalty, Jesus emerges 
the same : the complete Son of man, who knows 



112 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

what is in man, and reveals what is in God. 
This and nothing less is the historic truth of 
the matter. We know nothing in human story 
like it. It is the real miracle of Jesus. 

I have tried to show you that what is handed 
forth to us as his doctrine to-day is in large 
part not his at all. I have done this not by 
seeking to disprove, point by point, those many 
orthodox positions on which still totteringly 
stand the churches of to-day; but rather by 
indicating the long and devious processes by 
which religious thought has come down to our 
time, processes that from their very nature 
make it impossible that Christian truth, as we 
have received it, could be undefiled. 

A great river may, clear and pure, burst 
from its mountain home, but it has a long 
journey to make before it gains the sea. On 
that journey it loses its first glorious Alpine 
rush as it traverses the plain. Other streams 
join it and add to its volume. It takes tribute 
from the marsh land as well as from the 
sunny meadow. After the great city is passed, 
its tide is dank and foul. Yet, as Kingsley so 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 113 

beautifully sang, there is a very divine quality 
of self-cleansing in the river, and so most 
true it is that " it cleanses its stream as it 
hurries along to the calling sea." 

The river's story is the story of human 
life's endeavor. Truth is revealed to man as 
the river comes : at times purer than at others; 
at times so befouled in flow that it seems to 
carry only death on its dark current. Then 
once again obeying its law of self-purging, and 
almost free from stain and soilure, its mighty 
volume brings with it only fertility and joy. 
Then truly it seems to be the river that the 
writer of the Revelation saw in his immortal 
vision : "A river of water of life, clear as 
crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God 
and of the Lamb." 



114 THE REASONABLENESS OF 



IV 



THE NATURALNESS AND SUPERNATURALNESS 
OF JESUS 

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the 
works that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than these 
shall he do. — John xiv, 12. 

I said in my last lecture that what mankind 
greatly values it will fiercely guard. This is a 
commonplace, of course, yet men have failed 
often to make allowance for some results that 
have arisen from this most natural human 
predisposition. They have been startled and 
dismayed when the bars and barriers their 
predecessors have painfully built round their 
religious treasure houses came tumbling down. 
They have then bewailed the loss of what 
they most have prized, and fiercely they turn 
on the reformers, and believe, as Mary did in 
the dim light of that first Easter morning, 
that these have taken away their Lord. Relig- 
ious defences cost the builders much to put 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 115 

up. In the nature of things they must cost 
something to take down when the time to 
take them down arrives. 

Supernaturalism is a comprehensive sort of 
word, and might perhaps be taken as an explan- 
ation of much of our religious barrage and de- 
fence. Even the merest outline of the genesis 
and growth of belief in the supernatural is 
quite beyond the scope of these modest lec- 
tures, but I would point to the historic fact 
that the great world religions are all alike in 
claiming a supernatural origin, and in insist- 
ing, moreover, that the supernatural quality 
is a test of the value of religion. In early 
days it could not be otherwise. The world 
men lived in was a pretty rough, hard world. 
Light and darkness, evil and good, seemed to 
carry on an evenly balanced struggle, and 
none might confidently foretell the outcome. 

" If God is a power of light and goodness, 
let him prove himself such. If he cares for 
man in his lonely up-hill striving, let him 
show some sign of caring. If among earth's 
tumultuous voices he speaks, let it be in tones 



116 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

of compelling power, so that even the doubt- 
ing and hesitating may be forced to hear and 
obey." Naturally, religious passion cried out 
for a supernaturally self-revealing God, and, 
ah, which of us does not know well how 
deeply, hungrily, in our heart of hearts we 
crave still the God who comes to us by way 
of "the sign"? 

Once the supernaturally revealed God has 
spoken, a new reason for the continuous dis- 
play of the supernatural arises as a matter of 
course. What has been communicated is a 
matter of life and death in its supreme import- 
ance. It must be guarded. It must be pre- 
served. The gift to man is vain if it be not 
maintained and continued. So naturally and 
very soon something of the mystery and su- 
pernatural nature of the revelation comes to 
be attached to the means that are adopted for 
its preservation, and to those chosen as its 
appointed guardians. All who know anything 
of church history will remember how con- 
stantly such natural, nay, inevitable, develop- 
ments have occurred. The teachings of the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 117 

infancy of Jesus, the doctrine of his virgin 
birth, and as a logical outwork and defence 
of that doctrine, the further development of 
it into the quite modern pronouncement of 
the Eoman Church as to the Immaculate Con- 
ception of the Virgin Mary herself, must at 
once come to mind. 

To many truly religious and also thoughtful 
people such an evolutionary development of 
the Word and Seed principle of Jesus seems 
most natural, most necessary. Their place, 
and it is a large one, is in the great Church 
of Rome. There are others who, while they 
recognize that this line of development may 
have been the most natural one for early 
Christianity to take, may have indeed been 
the only possible development, by no means 
admit that they are necessarily bound to ac- 
cept its conclusions. It belonged to a time 
very different from our own. It was based on 
views of nature, of history, and of man that 
were temporary and misleading. They find 
no ground for it in the teachings of Jesus 
himself, no trace of it in the undisputed 



118 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

writings of St. Paul. It outrages their sense 
of reason, for to accept its conclusions neces- 
sarily cuts them off from modern scholarship 
and bars them from the ways of modern re- 
search. If to be a Christian means that a man 
must accept and confess what is briefly called 
the supernatural in the Christian religion, 
then Christians they will not, they cannot be. 
I need scarcely say, then, that the question 
of what is natural and supernatural in the per- 
son and teaching of Jesus is one of first im- 
portance to-day. Most of us know we are con- 
stantly thinking on this question, if we think 
on religious matters at all. Here the wisest 
are the first to confess a profound ignorance. 
They know well that theories commending 
themselves to reverent scholarship to-day may 
be replaced by newer and more satisfactory 
ones to-morrow, as human knowledge pushes 
its patient way a little further into the vast 
territories of the unknown. Yet dim as is our 
light, we cannot stifle enquiry if we would. No 
uncertainty in our own conclusions, no differ- 
ence of opinion among our teachers can pre- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 119 

vent our pursuit of the great question for 
ourselves. Why must we, it may be asked, 
conscious of our pitiful incapacity, insist on 
occupying ourselves with this problem which 
admittedly is so much too hard for us? Ah, it 
is because in our inmost hearts we know that 
we want Jesus, and that if we are forced to 
give him up, if he, too, like so many beauti- 
ful visions of the early days, is doomed to fade 
away in the stern light of actuality, then with 
him goes from us forever what has been most 
beautiful and inspiring in human life. 

Now the Saviour Jesus presented to most 
of you in boyhood was, we must admit, crudely 
supernatural. It was his unlikeness to us, not 
his unity with us, that was usually insisted 
upon. His supernaturalness, not his natural- 
ness. And now that most educated men can no 
longer believe in the supernatural, the Jesus 
who to them in their youth was ever presented 
clothed in the supernatural is becoming a faded 
figure, a less real personality. Whether we 
wish it or not therefore, we must, if we would 
hold him fast, ask, How far was the real Jesus 



120 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

supernatural? Does he claim supernatural 
powers? Did the supernatural in his days 
mean to men what it has come to mean to-day ? 

Whether he was supernatural or not, it must 
at least be evident to all that before forming 
an opinion, before taking sides on this great 
question, we owe it to ourselves first of all to 
look frankly, and if we can without bias, at 
his person and environment ; at himself, and 
his times, and his teaching. Only then may 
we hope to form some not altogether mistaken 
idea as to what was natural about him, what 
may be accounted for by ordinary human laws, 
by circumstances, by the limitations of his 
time, that are, or should be, well known and 
recognized; and what in his person and his 
teachings transcends these. 

The sup ernaturalis amoving point. What 
is inexplicable to one age is plainly explicable 
to the next. I need not argue this, for so much 
all will admit. That I should be able to whis- 
per to my friend one thousand miles away 
would have been deemed a stupendous mir- 
acle less than one hundred years ago. It is not 




THE RELIGION OF JESUS 121 

so very long since the, to us, common pheno- 
mena of mesmerism, thought transference, and 
second sight led men and women to torture and 
death. We forget that while less than four 
hundred martyrs suffered death in England, 
Scotland, and Ireland during Mary's reign, 
over four thousand witches, men, women, and 
children, too, were burned and drowned in 
Scotland alone during a comparatively short 
period. The men who tore Scotland free from 
Eome were the chief actors in that grim trag- 
edy. Puritan bigotry, not Roman intolerance, 
was guilty of that insensate folly. In those 
times, to deny supernaturalism was to court 
death. 

The Jews believed that by miracle the cities 
of the plain were destroyed. It did not occur, 
I fancy, to many pious people who were shocked 
at the awful news of Messina's calamity to at- 
tribute to miracle the earthquake and the tidal 
wave which destroyed a quarter of a million 
of lives in a few moments. 

The reason of this difference is not in the 
facts recorded, but in our point of view. The 



122 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

earthquake and its dreadful results are just as 
much part of the natural order under which 
we live as is the springing-up in your garden 
to-day of the myriads of daffodils and hya- 
cinths, that so beautifully deck the lawns. The 
man of science tells us that the earthquake is 
caused by the shrinking of the earth crust. 
We ourselves know that given sun, soil, rain, 
and seed, and our flower-beds will glow in the 
springtime. Yet, as a matter of fact, how the 
bulb grows from its rough brown unsightli- 
ness to odorous beauty, and how the awful 
calamity of the earthquake is prepared, we do 
not know. One process is as little understood 
by us as the other. Only we do know that 
both are according to nature's workings, not 
against them — are natural, not supernatural. 
Jesus was a Jew. His beliefs were those that 
would in the ordinary course of life come to 
a profoundly religious Jew. All men of his 
race and time believed in the supernatural. So 
did he. I think so much is evident to any care- 
ful reader of his recorded sayings and doings. 
But I think also it is no less certain that as his 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 123 

brief ministry advanced, he changed, in sev- 
eral important particulars, his views and his 
message. 

Such passages as, " I£ I had not come and 
spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but 
now they have no cloak for their sin"; 1 and, 
" Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee, 
Bethsaida ! for if the mighty works, which 
were done in you, had been done in Tyre and 
Sidon, they would have repented long ago in 
sackcloth and ashes " 2 seem to me final as to 
his profound belief in the value of his own 
miracles. On the other hand, signs are not 
wanting that towards the end his belief in the 
value of his miracles lessened. He is officially 
approached by the Pharisees and scribes, who 
desire him to show them a sign. "He an- 
swered and said unto them, When it is even- 
ing, ye say, It will be fair weather : for the 
sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul 
weather to-day : for the sky is red and low- 
ring. ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face 
of the sky ; but can ye not discern the signs of 

i John xv, 22. 2 Matt, xi, 21. 



124 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

the times? A wicked and adulterous genera- 
tion seeketh after a sign ; and there shall no 
sign be given unto it, but the sign of the pro- 
phet Jonas." * 

Again, Jesus' complaint, addressed to the 
multitude who followed him, would seem to 
indicate that he placed a very real value on 
his own miracles as means to induce faith (if 
in this passage the writer of the Fourth Gos- 
pel has preserved for us a saying nowhere else 
recorded) : "Ye seek me, not because ye saw 
the miracles, but because ye did eat of the 
loaves, and were filled. " 2 

I think, then, on the whole, that the modern 
theory, commonly advanced, that Jesus at- 
tached but secondary importance to his mira- 
cles, is an over-statement of the case. He pro- 
foundly believed in the supernatural himself. 
Why should he not? Had he not done so he 
would have been no real messenger to his time. 
The apostles after him believed in the super- 
natural. No reader of the Acts or the Epistles 
can doubt it. The speech of Peter, on the day 

i Matt, xvi, 1-4. 2 John vi, 26. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 125 

of Pentecost, whether it is reported accurately 
by St. Luke or not, reproduces without doubt 
the views of the apostles at that time. The 
speaker says: "Jesus of Nazareth, a man ap- 
proved of God among you by miracles and 
wonders and signs, ... ye ... by wicked 
hands have crucified and slain." Writing to 
the Corinthians, some thirty years later, St. 
Paul places in their order of relative value 
those who minister in the Church : " God hath 
set some in the church, first apostles, second- 
arily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that mir- 
acles, then gifts of healings." 1 

The testimony, then, of miracles was still 
highly regarded. Let us recognize this frankly, 
and as frankly declare that such belief was 
the natural belief of the time, and had no bind- 
ing power whatever on us. The supernatural 
is a movable point. 

In this world of ours, man is coming to his 

own, but he wins his way slowly. For long 

ages he must have held his cave's mouth with 

club and stone, against beasts vastly stronger 

1 1 Cor. xii, 28. 



126 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

than himself. His tool- wielding hand must 
have served him well ; and when at last he 
learned the secret of fire, his victory was as- 
sured. Even then it was on an unknown and 
hostile world he fared forth. How little could 
he know; how much less understand; and 
any exercise of power that seemed to him, who 
knew nothing as yet of his own powers, far 
more than human, was classed as miraculous, 
— the working of some superior being, bene- 
ficent or malevolent, as the case might be. 

Experience still supplies us with many things 
we cannot understand, but we no longer count 
them as supernatural. Few will deny to-day 

that back of the phenomena I referred to — 
mesmerism, thought transference, clairvoy- 
ance, etc. — there is something more than fraud. 
Prophets there have been (and perhaps are) 
who saw, by gifts we cannot gauge, into the 
future. Men and women are here to-day whose 
hands heal, whose touch removes pain. I had 
a friend — a doctor — who practised in the 
Northwest years ago when harvesting machin- 
ery was new, and when a good many accidents 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 127 

occurred from its use. Among his neighbors 
he found a Swedish farmer whose touch was 
of extraordinary power. My friend assured 
me that with a few passes he could remove the 
most violent pain, and that by his aid, and in 
the rough circumstances of the harvest field, 
he had performed numerous operations, some 
of a grave nature. The man was quite igno- 
rant, could not write, made no boast of his 
powers, and would never receive any compen- 
sation for what he did. In other times he would 
have been worshipped as a saint or burned as 
a witch. 

I stayed more than once in a beautiful sub- 
urban home of friends of mine in a Southern 
city. My hostess, the mother of a large family, 
suffered at times excruciatingly from pain in 
the temples. She was for years treated by the 
ablest medical men in the country, but the 
pain would return and in so violent a form 
that her reason seemed threatened ; the par- 
oxysms lasting ten to fifteen days. At last it 
was determined to remove the nerve (a very 
grave operation, I am told). I personally knew 



128 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

the great physician that advised this operation 
as a last resort. Shortly before the day set, 

Mrs. 's maid, a colored woman, said to her, 

" Why not let the blacksmith of the village 
see if he could not help her — he was often 

able to take away pain by rubbing." Mrs. 's 

family agreed. The man came two or three 
times, and till her death, fifteen years later, I 

believe Mrs. had no return of that pain. 

Here there are two instances of unaccounted- 
for powers which have come under my own ob- 
servation. To deny such phenomena, to ascribe 
them to fraud, is to be really credulous, really 
unscientific. There are many things in this 
our brief life that no philosophy yet formu- 
lated by us accounts for or explains. There 
are around and within us constant signs and 
evidences of the working of powers we as yet 
do not understand. But bit by. bit we are com- 
ing to understand them, coming to find their 
true place for them, as piece by piece we are 
surely putting together the puzzle of life. 

I do not find myself able to believe all the 
miracles ascribed to Jesus in the gospels. As 






THE RELIGION OF JESUS 129 

I have showed you, it is not reasonable to 
suppose that we have in those gospels any 
historic or accurate account of what actually 
took place. They are not, they do not pretend 
to be, history. But I do feel it most natural 
to believe that Jesus did work convincing 
miracles in order to commend his message, 
and far from believing such miracles to be 
impossible, I do not see how one, like the Son 
of man, coming at the time he did, and under 
the circumstances of that time, could be any- 
thing else than a miracle worker. Far from 
believing such miracles impossible, I think it 
more likely that in time to come, miracles 
will not offer any real difficulty to the thought- 
ful, but that our children, or our children's 
children, may yet see men on the earth who 
are good enough and great enough to work 
them. 

Miracles as Jesus wrought them were alto- 
gether the most beautiful and natural things 
possible. To think of them as breaks in God's 
law is illogical and absurd. To think of them 
as natural operations, wrought by higher good- 



130 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ness and higher power working in completer 
harmony with and understanding of the divine 
will, seems to me reasonableness itself. 

Thus to believe in the resurrection of Jesus 
is not to disbelieve in the natural order. If 
death is the extinction of life, and resurrection 
a new creation of life, resurrection would then 
seem incredible. But if death be merely the 
shedding of the body by the spirit, the sort 
of dying that the seed dies, then resurrection 
is the springing of the spirit life from the 
body life, and as in seed sowing, every death 
is but a resurrection. 

We know little about life; it is still a 
mystery to us. We ourselves but very partially 
understand ourselves. Surely there are powers 
latent within us as yet untried, unrecognized. 
When Jesus stood among men, there was to 
them revealed a new, an unknown type of 
man, — one pervious, as man had not yet been 
pervious, to the light, knowledge, and power 
of God; one full of the Holy Ghost from 
his mother's womb. His was a will at one 
with the Father's, a hand clasped in the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 131 

Father's hand. Well might his followers cry, 
" What manner of man is this, that even the 
winds and the sea obey him?" The ruder 
earth forces shape matter after an eternal law. 
These forces we ourselves have proved to be 
more and more obedient to man, and clearly 
we men are called to exercise, in the far future, 
a control on such forces, far greater, far more 
subtle, than anything we can accomplish to- 
day. 

It seems to me, then, far from unreasonable 
to believe that Jesus, the uniquely great man, 
by reason of his perviousness to God, found 
nature, as he found man, plastic to his hand. 
Is it not true that we can measure the relat- 
ive advance each living thing has made in 
the scales of being, by its relative perviousness 
to influences outside itself? All life as we 
know it is veiled from the Infinite Life, and 
life may be spoken of as of lowly or high 
order, in proportion to the thinness or thick- 
ness of the material veils enfolding it, hang- 
ing between it and the Infinite Life. 

Here are creatures scarcely alive, we say. 



132 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Such life as they have is only apparent to pa- 
tient study. They seem more vegetable than 
animal. They live, but their life draws small 
sustenance from our prime necessities of light 
and air. From these they are shut in by 
twenty thousand feet of sunless sea. The 
depths of the ocean veil them from our life- 
giving sun. Leaving ages behind us, as we 
rise in life's scales, we come on other veiled 
lives, but here the coverings are less opaque 
and are quickly drawn aside. Still for years 
many inches of impervious soil must cut the 
locust's larvae off from daylight, and years it 
must pass in its dark earth cradle, before it can 
spread its wings and sing its brief summer 
song. The frosts of many a winter, the rains 
of many a spring, and the persuasive warmth 
of many a summer day must search for it in 
the dark soil, for its veil, too, is thick and 
impervious. This is the way of the coral, the 
way of the locust, the way of the world. For 
how did planetary life come to be at all? 

Here science speaks with no uncertain voice. 
She claims authority, and, claiming it, she 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 133 

makes on us a stupendous demand. She ex- 
pects us to accept, almost without question, 
the truth of a miracle so great that I do not 
hesitate to say all the miracles of revelation 
are trivial by the side of it. Science teaches 
us that all the beauty, music, knowledge that 
go to make up what we understand of life 
have come out of a swirling, formless hurri- 
cane of fiery cosmic matter, and nothing else 
— out of a chaos so dark and rude, out of a 
blast so awful and death-dealing, that not even 
to an educated imagination can its fury be 
conceivable. In that long aeon of chaos, death 
reigned, not life. Chaos seemed to rule, not 
order. Then were enthroned powers surely 
utterly diabolic. Any sane, overlooking intel- 
ligence; any man even of genius who from 
some distant point of vantage might conceiv- 
ably have surveyed that chaotic storm, could 
have believed nothing less than that he was 
hearing and seeing, in its awful confusion and 
roaring turmoil, nature's articulated curse. In 
vast spaces, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, 
the fiery hurricane, with purposeless fury, prom- 



134 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ised to rage forever. So ages passed, and were 
followed by other ages, and some sort of 
comprehensible order grew, till, in the sub- 
lime language of the Bible, in the centre of 
dense vapor earth lifted herself, but she was 
" without form and void, and darkness was on 
the face of the deep." What had love or wisdom 
to do with such a gray, lifeless world as that? 
Then other ages passed, and forth from the 
ocean depths there came forms of life, grotesque 
and awful, that lived but to destroy. Then 
other ages passed, and lo ! man at last stood 
upon his feet. But what a man ! Is he a man? 
If he lifts hands of prayer, they are red with 
blood. He is dimly aware of his better self, 
if he is aware. He is surely liker far to the 
beasts from which he came. Cruel and lustful 
is he ; living on earth, far yet from ruling it, 
barely holding his own against savage beasts 
and threatening hunger, and without love or 
faith or much hope — just the blind instinct 
to live, keeping him alive. What has love and 
wisdom yet to do with such a world, or such 
a product of the world? 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 135 

I have not time, I need not go on to tell the 
oft-told tale of man's later progress, his de- 
feats, his many shames ; the many far ebbings 
in the tide of his advance, the many fair hopes 
of men and of nations cast down and betrayed ; 
of civilizations at last built up with much toil 
and blood, only to crumble into the dust again 
and forever to be lost and forgotten. But in 
spite of all these tragic and costly changes, 
the most careless student can now perceive a 
rise in life's scale, a growing towards a fuller 
self -consciousness ; a widening of the certainty 
of responsibility, a vast increase of the sense 
of pity, and a steady determination, even 
when storms are at their height, to keep life's 
tiller true. Night is not yet passed, nor are the 
storms yet over, but who could ever have 
dreamed, in those ages so far behind us, who 
could have dreamed, that out of such a chaos 
should have come forth the miracle, man? 

Knowledge is not yet ours. Day may not 
yet have dawned, but we are aware of a rose 
of coming dawn upon the gray sea, and on our 
earth, once without form and void, where un- 



136 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

disturbed darkness reigned, life's veil is thin- 
ning fast, and life is pervious to light as none 
would have dared to dream of its perviousness 
ages ago. Knowledge already is beginning to 
murmur a hesitating " amen " to the deep 
abiding hopes born of instinct and religion, 
and faith ventures to believe and declare that, 
as out of that swirling chaos, an order, an 
order inconceivable has come, so again out of 
what seems to us much confusion and waste 
and death, in the mystery of that order, is at 
last to emerge a state of being as much com- 
pleter and fairer than the present as the pre- 
sent is fairer than the past. 

Earth's history is the old story told over and 
over again, of Orpheus going even to hell to 
claim his bride. Why man needs chaos and hell, 
and why by an irresistible divine song-call he is 
ever lifted out of it, who can say ? But man 
came from chaos, and what may not yet come 
from man? 

Surely it is reasonable to believe that back 
of all veilings, penetrating at last all veils (for 
he has hung them), God our Father lives, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 137 

above all, through all, over all from the be- 
ginning ; that all creation is but the burying- 
away of life, the sowing of divine seedbeds. 
Whether it be in the ravines of the great sea, 
or the gauzy veilings of the silkworm, or the 
mysteriously sensitive gray matter of the hu- 
man brain, all creation is but a temporary 
veiling of life from God — a going-forth from 
Hirrty that it may return to Him, " For yet 
doth he ever devise means, whereby his ban- 
ished be not expelled from him " (as the wise 
woman said long ago to the mourning king). 
His banished ones own instinctively their ban- 
ishment, and strangely and variously try to 
come home. That is the meaning surely of 
life's struggle up. So the larvae struggles for a 
winged life, and the monkey fought his way 
to a man's life, and manhood stretches out 
longing, empty arms of prayer and calls upon 
his God for a divine life. 

God of the granite and the rose, 

Soul of the sparrow and the bee, 
The mighty tide of being rolls, 

Through countless channels, Lord, from Thee. 



138 THE REASONABLENESS OP 

It springs to life in grass and flowers, 
Through every grade of being runs, 

While from creation's utmost towers, 
Its glory streams in stars and suns. 

These are more than dreams. They are 
hopes founded by multitudes not only on 
growing knowledge and widening experience, 
but on a deeper understanding of the uni- 
versal longings and purposes of mankind. 

Jesus was a man supremely pervious to God. 
Shelley dreamed a dream long ago — one of 
the most beautiful dreams that ever visited a 
poet. He said : — 

Life like a dome of many-colored glass 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity. 

He saw the eternal life slowly penetrating 
our lower life, shining through it. William 
James, in his luminous lecture on Immortality, 
amplifies that thought. The measure of the 
scale of living things may be the thickness or 
thinness of the veil they present to God's 
"white radiance.' ' 

Surely of this much we may be sure, that 
when we come to study ourselves, we cannot 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 139 

but admit that life's veilings have thinned mar- 
vellously. See man preparing for his moment- 
ous career ! Nine months of silence, seeing 
not, knowing not, yet wonderful things of feet 
and hands and brain, of tongue and taste, of 
eyes and heart, waiting for a baby's resurrec- 
tion. Man's first life waiting to issue forth into 
the large world — and mark, not ages to wait, 
not years, but only nine short months before 
he reaches the sunlight; semi-conscious moth- 
erhood meanwhile playing its mysterious and 
as yet but partially understood part. 

Then after birth begins the second life of 
man. Now the veil is thinner still. Invariable 
law and fixed order lay their yoke on the grow- 
ing thing, yet soft hands and watchful care 
attend it, shielding it from danger, saving it 
from harm. Ah, how grudgingly love sees life 
fare forth ! How yearningly we would save it 
all pain and penalty if we might ; take its first 
woes on our parent shoulders if we but could ! 
It may not be. So we set our children to their 
childish tasks. We exact obedience and effort, 
and insist on responsibility. For we would 



140 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

make them men, to know manhood's joy and 
duties, and in time take up and finish man- 
hood's tasks. They must finish what we began. 
They must succeed where we failed. 

Sometimes we think that it is into a cold 
and heedless world we usher our children. We 
forget that our loving care, our passionate 
tenderness are but part and parcel of that 
world's order. The world forces and influences 
reach them, it is true, but these were meant 
to reach them through us. As for nine months 
the mother's bosom sheltered man's first life, 
so for an indefinitely long term parental love 
was ordained to shelter his second. Love, care, 
and wisdom tend life as it makes its fateful 
entrance. Childhood is pervious to parentage. 
What we have won, what we are, in large part 
we pass on to our children. 

Now what I am trying to make clear to you 
is that as our children are pervious to all we 
are as their parents, so are we pervious to God. 
Our plan of life for our children in the small 
is God's plan for all of us his children in the 
large. Man is a demigod. He rules by divine 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 141 

right this earth which is his kingdom. There 
is the unaccountable, there is the semi-mirac- 
ulous within him. Of us poor men even it is 
true, " What manner of man is this, that even 
the winds and the sea obey him? " He trans- 
forms the earth on which he lives. He yokes 
to his car earth's forces. More and more he 
compels nature to do his bidding, and pro- 
foundly he changes the face of the world. And 
beyond even these powers there belongs to 
him the power of choice; he can sink to the 
beast whence he came, or rise by self-mastery 
to the heights of genius or of sainthood. He 
can turn on or off the light of life, and so make 
his soul a holy temple or an unclean pigsty. 

It seems to me, the more I think on human 
life, that its history has been, and yet shall be, 
just one long filling of the splendid promise 
and command made and given to Adam in the 
legend of Genesis, " Have thou dominion." 
Forth from the faultless irresponsibilities of 
the garden life man had to pass, that he might 
take up the great task of being a man. Noth- 
ing henceforth comes to him without toil. His 



142 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

very daily bread shall depend on the sweat of 
his brow, but as he fits himself for lordship, lord- 
ship is given him. The secrets, the beauties, 
the powers lying unused and dormant in his 
kingdom, are only waiting for his compelling 
command. He is the child of all the long past. 
In him, and in him alone, can her ages of tra- 
vail be rewarded. He is both her explanation 
and her king. As St. Paul magnificently put 
it, "The whole creation groaneth and travail- 
eth, . . . waiting for the manifestation of the 
sons of God." 1 

Here at last in little Judea stands the Son 
of man. He is fit to be King, and King he 
therefore is, for he is supremely pervious to 
God. Such was the impression Jesus made on 
the ignorant but honest men who companied 
with him from the first, and though much 
that must have seemed utterly supernatural to 
them may to us seem natural, surely our 
knowledge of what man can do, and of what 
man did do, is so necessarily imperfect that 
the time for dogmatizing has not arrived. 

1 Romans vm, 19, 22. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 143 

Furthermore, those who charge orthodox 
religion with alone maintaining, in the face of 
scientific evidence to the contrary, an impos- 
sible doctrine of the supernatural, forget or 
ignore the fact that there is everywhere among 
plain people a tacit recognition and admission 
of the truth of supernaturalism to-day. Such 
admission is implied and understood in the 
laws of the land. "By act of God," so old 
laws still read. And so not the priesthood 
alone, but religious and irreligious people 
alike, philosophers and teachers, orthodox and 
heretic, kings and commoners, all professedly 
still believe in a God who acts on human 
affairs, not in one way, but in two different 
ways — one an orderly way, acting in and by 
the mind and work of man and nature's pro- 
cesses ; the other, an outside way, an interfer- 
ing way. God has, of course, in the common 
belief, his laws; these are beneficent and work 
on the whole for good. But he is not confined 
to these, but from time to time can and does, 
in response to special prayer and appeal made 
to him, sweep down, as it were, from heavenly 



144 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

calm into the troubled vortex of mundane af- 
fairs, and, by a sudden exercise of divine en- 
ergy, reassert his will and indicate his author- 
ity. This was the old belief of the Jews. All 
early religions are full of such a faith and 
strong in the assurance of a divine partiality. 
In such a belief Moslem, Calvinist, and Cath- 
olic alike went forth to accomplish and did 
accomplish the greatest tasks of men. Those 
were days in which men heartily believed in 
verbal inspiration and communicating voices 
from heaven. We who have ceased to believe 
in the value of such means of divine leading 
have not yet succeeded in replacing them with 
more reasonable opinions. 

The old is out of date, the new is not yet born. 

The form of the old, mummified, dusty 
dead remains to trouble us. 

One more important point I must raise be- 
fore I leave this subject. The interfering, the 
partial, the supernaturally acting God is still 
the God usually given to childhood. And 
here we do our children a cruel wrong. At 
school, at college, our view of the world and 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 145 

its mysteries is pressed on them. At home, if 
any religious teaching at all is given, it is too 
often of the archaic sort which I have been 
describing. It is the impossible and unworthy 
religion of the interfering God. 

Is it because we have not time ? Is it be- 
cause we have not wit? Or is it not rather 
because, to part with the great patient, partial 
Companion of our own youth is so cruelly 
hard to us ourselves ? I think this is often the 
chief cause of our faithless failure to re-state 
fully religious things to our children, or at 
least make the best attempt we can to do so. 
But oh, my friends, in this matter we must 
not weakly sentimentalize. Our children are 
born into an age, truth-seeking, truth-honor- 
ing. The Son of man, whose last appeal rang 
forth, " To this end was I born, and for this 
cause came I into the world, that I should 
bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is 
of the truth heareth my voice," can lead and 
inspire, as none other has or can, such an age, 
and as the supreme witness to the truth and 
martyr for the truth, we must present him to 



146 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

the young of our age. Let us do this, and 
they may be trusted to make their way to 
Jesus, and that Jesus who has led their fathers 
will surely lead them. 

I am old enough to remember Professor 
W. K. Clifford's exceeding bitter cry after the 
lost " companion God " of his youth. " We 
have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty 
heaven, to light up a soulless earth. We have 
felt with utter loneliness that the great Com- 
panion is dead." Clifford had been taught to 
worship the partial, the outside, the interfer- 
ing, the supernaturally working God. The 
spirit of his time seized on him. He must go 
forth among the searchers, the discoverers of 
his generation. At any cost he must seek the 
truth ; and so bravely he went. And the spirit 
of new discovery seized on him, as it did on 
the choice youth of fifty years ago. Men 
called it the scientific spirit. It seized on Clif- 
ford, as in other times it had seized on John 
Huss, Columbus, Michael Angelo, or Sir 
Francis Drake, inspiring them to strange and 
epoch-making adventure. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 147 

Ah, we may go much farther back in our 
old world's story, and still we shall find men 
breaking away from the dream God of their 
youth, sometimes seemingly to lose him for- 
ever, and sometimes to find a larger, juster, 
lovelier God. Our dreams have beautiful 
things in them, and because they are dreams, 
there mingle with the beautiful distorted and 
impossible things as well. Now, two things 
have combined to destroy the dream God of 
our youth. First, the growth of our moral 
consciousness. Our concepts of justice be- 
tween man and man have changed, have risen. 
Our sense of responsibility for men less for- 
tunate than ourselves has risen. We are on 
the side of the weak. We would if we could 
apportion life's burdens to the shoulders that 
must bear them. The obvious inequalities of 
life startle us. The unfairness of its divisions 
fills us with reforming, interfering zeal. Na- 
ture is abominably partial. She pets and 
spoils some of her children, while she starves 
and stunts others. We see these things clearly, 
and more than that, we feel them keenly. In- 



148 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

stinctively we recognize in these cruelly un- 
equal conditions a state of things we are im- 
pelled by all that is highest and worthiest 
within us to change, or, so far as we can, 
remove altogether. 

To the man who tries to find and follow 
the truth to-day, this is the task confronting 
him. A great task ! A long task ! But he 
believes not an impossible one. It is all that 
and more. It is a new task. It is the task 
of the new creature — the Christian demo- 
crat. 

It is not so long since good men, who 
bravely and successfully faced their own 
tasks, set for themselves a very different aim. 
They recognized that they were God's chosen 
— nature's (but they would not use that word) 
fortunate ones; the Elect, in short. They 
were anxious to maintain their superior posi- 
tion before all other things. They were what 
they were by the choice and blessing of a 
favoring God. Their prosperity on earth was 
a sign of divine approval. Their own future 
happiness in heaven was the one first and 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 149 

chief object of their search and prayer. So 
far are we removed from them, so greatly 
does our moral consciousness revolt from 
their standards of duty, that we find it hard 
at times to believe that they tried, as we are 
trying, to follow the example of our Saviour 
Christ, and be made like unto him. Our moral 
consciousness forbids us to entertain their 
idea of God. 

Secondly, the partial, the outside, the in- 
terfering God must go before man's widening, 
deepening understanding of the universe in 
which he finds himself ; of which he is a part, 
a product ; not something planted in it, but 
something springing out of it, justifying and 
explaining it all. In great and small, in high 
and low, in far past as well as in vital present, 
in all the universe, everywhere and always, is 
seen the unfailing working of law and order. 
Chance and caprice are shut out. An inter- 
fering and partial God is unknown. I have 
searched many books to find a definition of 
our order of law that is at the same time suc- 
cinct and understandable by ordinary men. 



150 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

The best I can find is in the writings of a 
great Jewish philosopher, Spinoza : — 

The providence of God is just the stable order 
of the universe, in which reason can find itself more 
and more at home, and fashion out of its materials 
new instruments for progress and happiness. All 
God's laws are inviolably observed. They partake 
of the nature of God himself. Being in fact his 
nature revealed, they are therefore characterized 
by eternal necessity and truth. 1 

Now I think all can understand this great 
man's statement of the inviolability of law, 
and I think most will admit its truth, and 
if it is true, then you can readily understand 
what the supernatural cannot be. The super- 
natural cannot be a breaking of those very 
laws by which Wisdom, Power, Love Eternal 
expresses itself. I may not understand those 
laws. I may misread them. I may not dis- 
cover them, and so may make many and sad 
mistakes ; men have done so and will yet do 
so in days to come. But if there is a God, as 
St. Paul believed, " above all and in all," so 

1 Professor Robert A. Duff, Political and Ethical Philo- 
sophy of Spinoza, p. 167. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 151 

surely then are his laws the expression of a 
divine wisdom, power, and love, and so surely 
must they be inviolable. To doubt that is to 
court madness. 

In the full meaning, therefore, of the term 
" supernatural/' using it as it should and must 
be used, neither Jesus nor his works can be 
supernatural. We may not be able to explain 
him — we are not able. I do not believe that 
any knowledge we have, or for a long time 
hence may have, of men or of matter, will 
explain Jesus. But this is not to proclaim him 
a supernatural, as one outside our universe of 
law. Nay, he was part of God's " eternal order 
of necessity and truth." 

Bearing in mind what I have said about the 
supernatural, let us turn to the person of the 
Master. The old way of accounting for his 
person and birth, the way by which we have, 
most of us, been brought up to account for 
them, the way commonly called " orthodox," 
is no real way at all. Yet it is the way at least 
professed to be believed in by most Christians. 
It is not the oldest way. It is the way of 



152 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

the ages after Jesus, not of the times of Jesus. 
That he was virgin born, without earthly 
father, and not as are other men, is stated in 
two of the gospels; and these are not the 
earliest compilations. The oldest gospel, Mark, 
makes no reference to his birth at all. Luke 
traces his genealogy to Joseph. Jesus himself 
never refers to his birth. The apostles never 
mention it. It is referred to in no apostolic 
epistle. As a dogma it was formally grafted 
on Christian belief at the Council of Nice, 
325 a.d. 

By the fourth century the idea of the vir- 
gin birth had become the custom of the time. 
The Christian religion had made great pro- 
gress in the East. Egypt was the ancient home 
of such beliefs. The East accepted such a 
birth as an almost usual thing. The great, the 
divine, were so born. Thus it was natural to 
think of Jesus as born of a virgin. If the di- 
vine man, the supreme saviour was to outshine, 
out-rank all other men, he too must be virgin 
born. So in quite early days, myth gathered 
round the Master, good men again brought to 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 153 

the best they knew, the best they had, and in 
time the anathema of the Church was stamped 
on all who denied what neither Jesus nor his 
apostles knew anything about. 

To us, who are not quite so densely ignor- 
ant of biological matters as were the men of 
those times, it is of course evident that the 
theory they held to could not yield them what 
they sought. By eliminating an earthly father, 
those good men would fain free their Lord's 
nature from all mundane stain, from all taint 
of human sin and error. After the ignorance 
of the time, they believed that the positive 
quality, the determining factor, in human gen- 
eration was the male ; the mother was merely 
a passive agent. This belief was natural in an 
age that gave to women so lowly a place, but 
it was inaccurate. They were seeking to do 
him honor for whose sake they were prepared 
to die, and they did it in the only way they 
knew. It was all most natural, but we can 
honor Jesus without copying their error or 
accepting their impossible theories of biology. 

The pot-makers are at work again. Beauti- 



154 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ful garments to adorn the son of Mary must 
be woven, another treasury built to retain and 
protect the living seed of his body. Let us 
thankfully accept the precious heritage they 
pass down to us. Let us claim the Saviour, 
while reverently we lay aside as outworn and 
no longer necessary the very old and beauti- 
ful myth that shadows his cradle. It is unde- 
niably beautiful, but even so it would rob us 
of what is most precious in our Lord. There 
is another picture of that cradle. An older 
picture and one at least as beautiful. The in- 
spired unknown who wrote the Epistle to the 
Hebrews gives it to us, and it runs : " Where- 
fore in all tilings it behoved him to be made 
like unto his brethren." 1 One like us in all 
things, one of us he declared himself to be, 
and no mistaken adulation of his person must 
rob us of his human reality. Unless Jesus was 
a man with limited knowledge, with human 
attributes and temptations, his life can be for 
me no true model, his death no comforting 
example to men. If he came into our world 

i Heb. n, 17. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 155 

as no other man came, if his course in that 
world was marked by superhuman power over 
the forces of nature that confront and oppress 
us, then the text I have placed at the head of 
this lecture is a misleading delusion : " He 
that believeth on me, the works that I do 
shall he do also ; and greater works than 
these shall he do; because I go unto my 
Father^ 

To multitudes of faithful people still these 
old theories that we were brought up on pre- 
sent no insurmountable difficulties. Let such 
hold to them ; only, as they do so, let them 
recognize that these ancient dogmas as to the 
method of Jesus' incarnation are not of the 
original deposit, but are the growth (the nat- 
ural and necessary growth, I admit) of a 
later time. 

Let those, on the other hand, who reject 
time-worn tradition remember that no theory 
of Jesus' person, because it is more reasonable 
than those we reject, can avail to make any 
of us like him. To be like him, we must fol- 
low and obey him, for only in obeying shall 



156 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

we learn to know his truth or share his 
power. 

In conclusion, I hear some say, "If the 
old theories, old beliefs have worked so well, 
if you can still say as you do, ' Let those who 
believe them retain them/ why do you then 
come here disturbing our faith, denying and 
destroying our old precious beliefs ? " 

Let me try and tell you why. There are 
multitudes to-day of honest men and women 
who have been uplifted and inspired by what 
is best in the truth-seeking, truth-loving spirit 
of our time. Amid the immense activities of 
the age, the bewildering increase of knowledge, 
they stand confused. New duties appeal to 
them in throngs; ancient wrongs, seeming to 
them dreadful, call for reform and removal. 
Between their intensified sense of truth, their 
deepened consciousness of duty, they are over- 
whelmed. Such people need a strong, sane, 
hopeful, and inspiring leader, and such is 
Jesus. Never did any age need his leadership 
as our age needs it. And not as guide only, 
but as old-fashioned Saviour we need him, for 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 157 

sin, in new and beautifully compelling guise, 
waylays us still, as it ever has the sons and 
daughters of men. No merely scientific spirit 
can save us, or can take with us the place of 
him who is called Jesus, "for he shall save his 
people from their sins." 

Now orthodoxy agrees to all this, and ap- 
proves such statements, and then quickly for- 
gets that if it insist on making the guide and 
Saviour a supernatural and half -human being, 
then he can no longer be a real guide or a 
real Saviour. He fades away from us into the 
region of mirage and myth. Orthodox Christ- 
ianity does actually say, " I am Christianity. 
I have built and supported these churches. 
I welcome you to them. I offer you this spirit- 
ual treasure of which I have been appointed 
the guardian. I would lead you to the Lord 
I love and revere, that you may know the 
comfort of his Spirit, the power and peace of 
his salvation. The church doors are open to 
you. My hand is stretched in welcome. In 
the name of my Lord, I invite you, but — 
unless you agree with me about the mystery 



158 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

of his nature, before birth, at birth, and after 
birth, you cannot have my Lord at all." Alas, 
I am not exaggerating. So far as Orthodoxy 
is concerned, the echo of an age-old anathema 
is in the air, and they who cannot accept the 
Son of the virgin, the impossible mythic man ; 
they to whom the supernatural is impossible 
and repellent, may not have Jesus at all. 

Jesus said, and died saying that every one 
that was of the Truth heard his voice ; that 
every one that sought to do his will, had a 
place by right in his company. Orthodoxy 
knows better than the Master himself what 
he wanted, and so imposes on his would-be 
disciples conditions and beliefs he not only 
did not formulate, but knew nothing about. 
Human nature repeats itself. The very disci- 
ples, when the Master was not by, did not 
hesitate to bar good men from him because 
they could not agree with those men. The 
disciples, in their own small, prejudiced, and 
narrow way, were quite ready to do precisely 
what the Pharisees had done in the large, 
more authoritative and national way, namely, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 159 

bind burdens on men's shoulders — burdens 
of custom, tradition, and agreement — till the 
very state of affairs Jesus protested against 
had again obtained, and good men had made 
"the word of God of none effect through 
their tradition." 

I have been out in the world of to-day, and 
I know whereof I speak. I have looked at men 
outside our closely drawn sheepfold lines, and 
outside those lines I see thousands who should 
be inside. These outsiders need, and feel they 
need, the efficiency of organized religious life. 
They, or the most of them, recognize the need 
of organization. Without it nothing can be 
stable in our human affairs ; because of it, we 
have Christianity. Had not Christianity been 
strongly organized in the form of a Church, 
during long, ignorant, and doubtful times, 
we should not be where we are, or know or 
prize what we have, what has been handed 
down to us. 

The mode of the Church's government 
may be a matter of expediency, but the need 
of the Church' s firm organization is a matter 



160 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

of prime, necessity. If any Church would 
stand, it must effectively organize the spirit- 
ual life of its membership, or all that has been 
gained by it for mankind may be scattered 
and lost by the vagaries and eccentricities of 
individual feeling and action. Multitudes of 
good men outside our churches realize all this, 
yet they are still outside. If they need the 
Church, surely the Church needs them. If 
they need shepherding, she needs sheep. They 
alone can save her from dry rot. They alone 
can fill her depleted and undersized ranks, and 
make her efficient in her holy war. They are 
not inside because they cannot, they believe, 
honestly profess what the Church calls on them 
to profess. They profoundly believe they can, 
for the present, better serve the truth-loving 
Son of man by refusing to say about him and 
about his Church what they cannot believe to 
be true. Mistake it not, forget it not, the cru- 
sading ages are not past and dead. The great- 
est crusade that faith, hope, and charity have 
ever ventured forth on is but beginning, and 
only one man can lead it to a glorious end. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 161 

The mass of men are slaves still — slaves to 
their passions, to their condition, to their pre- 
judices, to their poverty, to their lot. Mor- 
ally, socially, economically, mentally, the mul- 
titudes are still in bondage, but a brighter 
day is dawning, and a spirit of larger charity 
and higher resolve is moving the hearts of 
men. Oh, that the old Church would but re- 
cognize the fatef ulness of the hour and place 
herself at its head. The crusade is her crusade, 
the old, old cause of mankind, and its aim is 
not the winning of Christ's birthplace, but 
the freeing of his sons. 



162 THE REASONABLENESS OF 



JESUS DOCTRINE 

Never man spake like this man. — John vn, 46. 

A further question remains to be answered. 
Where did Jesus get bis doctrine? Have the 
truths he gave to men their sole origin in him? 
Was be the first to see and reveal them ? Is 
he a teacher, — as the early mystics saw him, 
— " without spiritual father or mother, with- 
out descent, having neither beginning of days 
nor end of life," or did he not rather find the 
basis of what he gave to men, and often more 
than the mere basis, in the continuous revela- 
tion that had providentially been given to the 
Jew from the very beginning of his national 
life? Thus to put the question is to answer 
it. Jesus' teachings, as they are recorded for 
us, are on this point explicit. He built his doc- 
trine on the past, and he quoted the sacred 
writings to prove the righteousness of his ap- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 163 

peal. He claimed ever to fulfil, not to destroy, 
the best beliefs and hopes that his people in- 
herited from their lawgivers and their pro- 
phets. He denounced those inevitable pro- 
cesses by which the truth given to one age 
had been muffled up and distorted by the next, 
but ever as he did this, he appealed to the ex- 
ample of the greatest of those before him — who 
had been obliged to make the very same pro- 
test. When he chooses his text, — challenged 
to declare himself in the little society where 
he had been brought up, — it is taken from 
that great teacher who long before had cried, — 

" The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me ; be- 
cause the Lord hath anointed me to preach good 
tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the 
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, 
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound ; 
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 1 

This same mighty voice it was that had 
hurled against Jewish formalism the tremen- 
dous accusation : — 

" To what purpose is the multitude of your sac- 
rifices unto me ? saith the Lord : I am full of the 

1 Is. lxi, 1, 2. 



164 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; 
and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of 
lambs, or of he goats. . . . Bring no more vain 
oblations ; incense is an abomination unto me ; the 
new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, 
I cannot away with. . . . Your new moons and 
your appointed feasts my soul hateth : . . . I am 
weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth 
your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, 
when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: 
your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you 
clean." * 

No one can read such passages as these and 
not recognize in them the very spirit of the 
appeal of Jesus. In claiming too, as he did, 
the right to push aside some of the legislation 
which the nation believed had Mosaic sanc- 
tion, he only stood where the great prophets 
stood before him. 

In his teaching, then, so far as he can, Jesus 
takes his texts from the past. He finds the 
living seeds still growing in old and weed- 
choked fields. He gathers the grain of God 
and of truth, and re-sows it. Let me particu- 
larize : His doctrine of life for man beyond 

i Is. i, 11-16. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 165 

the grave was no new doctrine to the later 
Jews. Most of them held to it stoutly, though 
by legal subtleties they might obscure it. 
From these, then, he would rescue it, retain- 
ing its essential part. Jesus had a new and 
confident hold on immortality himself. It 
meant all in all to him, and then as he sowed 
it, it became a new and beautiful thing, a liv- 
ing seed, an inextinguishable hope. In the 
dark ages that were soon to fall upon the 
world, men would have despaired without it. 
In those times it was inevitable that the doc- 
trine of immortality should assume the crudi- 
ties that belonged to the times, but its life- 
giving power was never lost. 

So in his doctrine of Fatherhood : the God 
Jesus worshipped was the Father of his child- 
ren. In emphasizing this again the Master 
was but fulfilling what was best in the ancient 
belief. Whether he believed that all men are 
the children of God does not seem quite clear. 
Certainly St. Paul thought that he was justi- 
fied in drawing such a conclusion from his 
teaching, for he based his appeal to the cul- 



166 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ture of Greece on a fatherhood that is univer- 
sal. 

What is of immediate importance to my ar- 
gument, however, is that the doctrine of a 
divine and universal fatherhood had long be- 
fore been proclaimed. In Isaiah lxiii, the 
prophet who has been retelling the story of 
God's patience with his people, claims his 
fatherhood for others who were not Jews. 
" Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abra- 
ham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge 
us not : thou, Lord, art our Father, our 
Redeemer ; thy name is from everlasting " 
(v. 16). That is to say, thy very everlasting 
nature is fatherly. 

Finally, to take but one more instance of 
many in which Jesus took from the past the 
germ of his gospel doctrine, see his teaching 
of a coming kingdom of heaven. The doctrine 
of immortal hope developed in later Judaism 
meant more than a personal hope. It had come 
to mean the promise of a higher, holier order 
of living, a kingdom .of heaven on earth. 

In our gospels, Jesus' teaching of the king- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 167 

dom is somewhat confusedly set forth. Doubt- 
less much that he said in regard to it has been 
lost, and much more retained that reflects in 
its final expression the wishes and standards 
of a succeeding age. The Apocalypse furnishes 
a striking instance of how soon even the best 
men's predictions began to mould and change 
the truths Jesus saw. The writer, you remem- 
ber, in a series of pictures that still grip our 
souls, dwells with a fierce delight on the over- 
whelming ruin — that the " Lamb " metes out 
to those who deny him — when "the great 
day of his wrath is come." 1 " And I saw heaven 
opened," he says, " and behold a white horse ; 
and he that sat upon him was called Faithful 
and True, and in righteousness he doth judge 
and make war. His eyes were as a flame of 
fire, and on his head were many crowns. . . . 
He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood : 
and his name is called The Word of God. And 
the armies which were in heaven followed him 
upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white 
and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a 
1 Rev. vi, 17. 



168 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

sharp sword, that with it he should smite 
the nations; and he shall rule them with a 
rod of iron : and he treadeth the winepress 
of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty 
God." 1 

Literature knows nothing more sublime. 
The inspired writer's passion grips our souls, 
and may for a time carry us away. But some- 
how we feel we have left the Jesus we knew 
far behind — the Jesus of Nazareth who was 
meek and lowly in heart, who went about do- 
ing good and healing those that were op- 
pressed of the devil. This view of the Kingdom 
of Heaven is surely very hard to reconcile with 
much he taught. A kingdom that " cometh 
not with observation," a kingdom that was 
"within men," even within his persecutors. 
(It was to the Pharisees he said : " The king- 
dom of God is within you." 2 ) The Patmos 
doctrine is surely a glorious harking back to 
the older Jewish idea of the reign of God. 
Still, to believe, as the great Jewish teachers 
had ever done, in a final victory of God and 

1 Rev. xix, 11-15. 2 Luke xvn, 20, 21. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 169 

good at all was most certainly a triumph of 
faith. And it was from their ancient idea of 
that divine kingdom that the Master evolved 
his own gentler and more universal doctrine. 
He knew what was in man. Had not the best 
of men ever and always craved a divine King ? 
What were all earthly kings and kingdoms, all 
efforts made for them, all sacrifices endured 
for them, but poor transient attempts to ex- 
press what some day men hoped to see ? And 
the poor sovereignty of the merely human 
king remained sacred because it dimly hinted 
at a sovereignty far transcending itself. The 
deep want of the human heart cries out for a 
king. It is the Kingdom of Heaven that I crave. 
The broken lights of truth ; the mockeries of 
half knowledge; the spotted and stained good- 
ness of the best of men, — these cannot sat- 
isfy me : I want God ! 

Humanity in the mass, the posifcivist's God, 
is but a poor divinity. It is abhorrent to me 
to think of man or any multiple of man as the 
highest thing in all the universe. The centre 
of it all must be something far holier, stronger, 



170 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

less mutable than myself. In the physical order 
I stand alone in my greatness ; yet am I a 
thing of but few days, holding life by a frail 
thread. I can mould the plastic masses to my 
will, I am conscious of dominion ; yet in my 
greatness I am most conscious of my weakness 
and my loneliness. I want a lord and king. I 
cannot worship myself, or any multiple of my- 
self. The longer I live, the surer I am that all 
men are alike in their good qualities and their 
bad. The great mass of us average about the 
same. Some rise here and there with about 
their heads a halo of some great goodness, 
some great virtue, some great deed done. But 
if you watch and observe, in spite of all the 
pitiful untruth and subterfuge of human bio- 
graphy, you will see that though acclaims 
mount to dizziest height, and humanity cheers 
its idol to the point of self-induced hysteria, 
though the halo-bound head be of gold, the 
feet that support it are of clay. The inspired 
visionary lacks poise, steadfast purpose, or 
some other necessary quality of greatness. 
The practical man who accomplishes great 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 171 

tasks has no head of gold, nor are his feet 
clay. He marches to his goal with an unfalter- 
ing stride; but then those purposeful, practical 
feet sometimes crush the weaker folk that 
come in their way. We need the marching 
great men as much as the men of sublime vi- 
sion ; the puller-down of strongholds, as much 
as the dreamer of fair dreams. The moral 
qualities one lacks, the other possesses. But 
none possess both or all. 

My soul craves something higher, completer 
than these — for it is athirst for God ; for 
God to forgive me, to cleanse me, to decide 
for me, to judge me : ah, to do more ! — to 
love me, to love the things in me that were 
almost ready to be born, but never saw the 
light ; songs fit to be sung, but never put to 
earthly music ; to love the innate good in me 
that was dwarfed and stunted. My soul is 
athirst for God, at the long last to care for 
me, to take me at my true value, and to take 
me home. Who can tell them? Who describe 
them? But such are the unquenchable long- 
ings of the human soul, and it was to them 



172 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Jesus brought his gospel of salvation, his mes- 
sage of hope. 

God's fatherhood, — that is, a God who 
cares, — man's hope beyond death, and the 
ultimate victory of goodness and light over 
sin : this was the threefold gospel of Jesus. 
It was his reply to what men craved in his time, 
to what men have craved in all times, to what 
we hunger for to-day. There is no substitute 
for that gospel, for no other solace has been 
found for that craving. 

I have tried, very briefly and imperfectly, 
then, to show you Jesus as a teacher, coming 
after other Jewish teachers, choosing from 
their store the best, the most vital messages ; 
gathering up their clearest and holiest visions 
and repeating them ; filling them with his own 
wonderful spiritual power, offering them as 
new, and yet as old gifts to men. 

But Jesus was more than a teacher. He 
claimed to be an example (and that is a claim 
none ever made before), an example and an 
illustration of how a man should take his true 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 173 

and divinely appointed place in the order of 
this world, a world wherein was much sin and 
suffering, much that was mysterious and baf- 
fling to faith — if men were to believe that it 
was created and maintained by a God who 
cared. Jesus' final claim on man's confidence 
and belief was this, that he offered himself as 
an explanation of the order of the world. 
Living, serving, dying, rising, he revealed 
God's will and law concerning it. 

Such was the unique claim of the unique 
man. 

Now, as was altogether natural, this claim 
must first be so presented as to win the con- 
fidence of his own people, the Jews. " I am 
not come," says he, " but to the lost sheep of 
the house of Israel"; and it was by his example 
and in obedience to his command that the first 
activities of the early Church were confined to 
missionizing in Judea. 

As I have pointed out, while he lived, Jesus 
based his appeals to his countrymen on the 
ancient writings both he and they venerated. 



174 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

And after he died, in claiming messiahship 
for him, his followers of necessity continued 
to base their claim on the same sources of au- 
thority. Could it be proved to them from holy 
writ that Jesus was the Messiah they expected, 
then their acceptance of him was sure. Fail- 
ing the establishment of such a claim, his re- 
jection by them was certain. 

If it must be admitted, and I think it must 
be admitted, that often the passages quoted 
by the apostles and teachers, a report of whose 
arguments have been preserved for us in the 
New Testament, will not bear the heavy load of 
proof that they sought to impose on them, the 
custom of the time must be remembered in 
their excuse. They but handled the sacred 
writings as the best and wisest men of their 
day handled them. Gloss and paraphrase were 
then the rule. They could only do as they had 
been taught. They had seen a great light, a 
light falling from inmost heaven on a living 
man and on an ancient law. They had com- 
panied with Jesus, and had not their " hearts 
burned within them," as he who spake as never 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 175 

man spake, " talked with them by the way and 
opened to them the scriptures " ? 

As time went on, and a larger missionary 
field opened before the Church, her vision 
widened, as Jesus had promised it should. Im- 
pelled by the spirit, Jewish Christianity be- 
came too great, too universal a thing to remain 
the possession of a tribe. Peter's momentous 
decision in the matter of the proselyte Cor- 
nelius first led to the change. The Temple's 
door had ever been shut to the outside world, 
but now a few men began to dream of a tem- 
ple not "made with hands," of worshippers 
who bowed in spirit and in truth before, not 
a golden, but an invisible altar. 

Then rose great Paul, a Hebrew of the He- 
brews, yet deeply touched with the vision of 
the wider world ; more fully convinced of the 
universal mission of Jesus than were any of 
that early band; and with Paul — as I have 
already said — there came a momentous en- 
largement of Christian doctrine. Paul spoke 
and wrote for a wider than a Jewish audience. 
It was necessary for him, therefore, to make 



176 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

an appeal to authorities other than those the 
Jews revered. His manner of quotation from 
the sacred Scriptures is the manner of his time. 
His proof texts do not always prove ; but apart 
from the method of the rabbinical school in 
which he was trained, and which left its per- 
manent mark on him, Paul has the grip of a 
master on the sacred literature of his people, 
and a profoundly sympathetic understander 
of the wider world he set himself to win. 

Just now I spoke of three great doctrines 
drawn by Jesus from the past — restated and 
enlarged by him, and given forth as living seed 
to men ! God's fatherhood — that is, a God 
who cares; man's hope beyond death, Christ- 
ian immortality ; and the ultimate victory of 
goodness and light over sin — that is, the cer- 
tainty of the Kingdom of Heaven. To these 
Paul added his philosophy of the Master's per- 
son and sacrifice. By its means he would ex- 
plain them all. 

To attempt even an outline of Paul's philo- 
sophy would be out of place here. Yet on 
one aspect of it I must dwell for a little, for 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 177 

it has become part of our belief. I refer to his 
theory of the sacrificial value of the life and 
death of Jesus. This is really of first import- 
ance, because it was the earliest effort made 
by the Christian mind to bind together the 
sacrificial ideas of the Jewish past and the 
Christian present. Such an effort was inevita- 
ble, for Jesus himself had rendered it inevita- 
ble when he declared that his life was the ful- 
filling of the divine law, and that law from 
beginning to end was sacrificial. 

Let it be at once admitted that Paul's theory 
of the sacrificial value of the life and death of 
Jesus in many ways satisfies us no longer. 
The ancient illustrations of the law of sacri- 
fice, the steaming altar, the transferred guilt, 
the atoning blood, the mediating priest are 
figures of a remote and barbaric time. They 
served well the purpose of the time that pro- 
duced and ennobled them. They helped men 
then to pray and to believe. They represented 
as high an ideal of God as men could accept, 
but to insist on them now would but push 
men towards prayerlessness and despair. 



178 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Apart from these temporal and local limita- 
tions of the mind, Paul had a vision of the 
meaning of the life and death of Jesus which 
had and has a vital relation to all life and to 
every age, which must survive all the tempor- 
ary forms in which reverence clothes it, must 
outlast all sacred repositories provided for its 
safe-keeping. He believed that the sacrifice of 
Jesus is the illustration of the one finally true 
law of human life in this our world ; that in 
Jesus the beauty and the reasonableness of 
the sacrificial life are revealed ; that in this sense 
— and it is the highest and final sense — all 
priests and temples and altars are but shad- 
ows and pictures of that real sacrifice which is 
the sacrifice of the life of man. I will quote 
a passage written towards the close of his life 
which embodies the Pauline philosophy — and 
is indeed a comprehensive statement of what 
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus came 
to mean to him : — 

" Not looking each of you to his own things, but 
each of you also to the things of others. Have this 
mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus : who, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 179 

being in the form of God, counted it not a prize 
to be on an equality with God, but emptied him- 
self, taking the form of a servant, being made in 
the likeness of men ; and being found in fashion as 
a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even 
unto death, yea, the death of the cross. Wherefore 
also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him 
the name which is above every name ; that in the 
name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in 
heaven and things on earth and things under the 
earth, and that every tongue should confess that 
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
Father." 1 

In these verses St. Paul's meaning at least 
is unmistakable. They sum up, too, much of 
his maturer teaching. The question which some 
of us are in doubt about to-day is, Is it pos- 
sible to accept a rule of life so difficult, so sim- 
ple? Surrounded as we are by temptations, 
conscious as we are of a pitiful mixture of 
motive, is it possible for us in any real sense 
to yield practical obedience to these most 
searchingand comprehensive commands? Look 
steadily, says the apostle, with purposefulness, 
with honest intention, not on your own affairs 
■ Phil, ii, 4-11, R. V. 



180 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

only, but on the things of others. Look 
as you would look when pursuing your own 
interests, wisely, bravely; not merely as you 
study a problem, but as you plan an enterprise. 
Look on the things of others, and, as you look, 
let Christ's very mind be yours ; look as he 
looked. The prize of life he could have grasped ; 
he sought it not for himself. All the powers 
of an extraordinary manhood were his; he 
stripped himself of them and voluntarily fore- 
went his own legitimate advantage. He stooped 
to weakness when he need not have stooped. 
He was willing to die, and met death in its 
most awful shape ; turning to death, agony, 
and defeat; choosing these deliberately as his 
portion sooner than give up his high purpose 
of saving his fellow men. His deliberate mode 
of action, ruling all his life and finally con- 
summated by his death, Paul declares God ac- 
cepts and crowns, and, so accepting and crown- 
ing it, declares it to be the one supreme, final, 
permanent, and victorious form of life for- 
ever. This indisputably is St. Paul's meaning. 
This is Christianity, and the mind of Christ 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 181 

as he understood it, preached it, and died 
for it. 

Is this mind of Christ possible to us to-day ? 
There is very much in the everyday life of us 
all which seems, at a superficial glance, to 
deny the practicability of living after this high 
standard. We need the stimulus of competi- 
tion. This is not lacking even in our college 
days. You are feeling what you believe to be 
its legitimate- influence now. You are gather- 
ing the results, in these last few crowded, ex- 
citing weeks of your university life, of a series 
of competitions, in which you have engaged 
during all the course of it ; and you feel that 
in the stimulus of reasonable competition there 
is real good. Yet if you look at this college 
life of yours at all searchingly, you are soon 
aware that competition forms a very small part 
of its life. Its main value lies far away from 
mere advantages of competition. Its chief 
gains are not to be won in any game of grab. 
Eather it is in coming to understand your own 
life, winning invaluable opportunities to study 
men of like purposes and yet different capaci- 



182 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

ties from your own, and in the leisurely asso- 
ciating with so much that is best and stimu- 
lating in American life and scholarship, that 
the main good of it all lies. And as from over 
the college walls, in an occasional thoughtful 
hour, you look towards the future, you have 
felt again that competition as a rule of life 
with one's fellow is, after all, a semi-barbarous 
law, and that it bears to the generous spirit 
pretty much the same relation that the sting- 
ing spur does to the thoroughbred's flank. 
By itself, it never won a great race yet. The 
best blood scarcely acknowledges it. 

Thus, as we look within and then without, 
we are gradually aware that in a strange and 
wonderful way the ideal of self-sacrificing serv- 
ice is growing on men. When sometimes, dis- 
heartened and downcast, we seem to see in life 
just the same sordidness and cruelty that used 
to rule it long ago, we are aware that such a 
state of mind is more or less colored by pass- 
ing mood or feeling, and is not borne out by 
fact. The studies of these past years ought to 
have done something to convince you that 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 183 

there is a tide in the affairs of men, a tide of 
pity, an earnest, self-sacrificing interest, that 
flows and ebbs not. More thoughtfully, more 
considerately, man looks on the life of his fel- 
low. Our forefathers played the game of grab 
so remorselessly, we ourselves are so often 
keenly set at it, that a life without strife, an 
existence in which competition in a thousand 
forms and shapes does not play a prominent 
part, is hard, nay, almost impossible for us to 
conceive. We are so wedded to ideas of con- 
tention and competition that any other condi- 
tions than those springing from these are well- 
nigh inconceivable to us. 

And yet his life is poor and narrow, indeed, 
who has not been blest by some vision of an 
existence in which love casts out strife ; some 
limited sphere of life, at least, in which com- 
petition and strife are not. It is possible for 
even a very imperfect character to love some 
one with such a love that into his relations with 
that person competition and strife cannot enter. 
For this loved one we forego our own advantage 
with delight. For the sake of such, to suffer is 



184 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

as natural a thing as to breathe. Further than 
this, if we look around us thoughtfully, we 
must be aware that man's sphere of love is 
ever widening; that widening interests bring 
men more and more together. Warmer ties are 
gaining strength surely, if slowly. Man is no 
longer cut off from man as he used to be. Life 
overlaps life. The hard, high walls of prejudice 
and caste, of difference in fortune, and even 
in nationhood, no longer serve to separate 
men altogether from each other, as they used 
to do. 

Look backward for the space of a few gen- 
erations only, and you see the best men, the 
wisest, the most cultivated, incomprehensibly 
callous to the wants and woes of those near 
them, untouched by the feeling of their infirm- 
ity, unmoved by their bitterest cry. Some two 
years ago, I happened to spend two weeks of 
spring weather in the ancient city of Nurem- 
berg. There, little changed by our modern 
life, stands that wonderful city. In its courts 
and palaces, in its narrow streets and splendid 
churches, the very spirit of medievalism seems 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 185 

to have found its last retreat. There is scarcely 
a finer hall in Europe than that splendid coun- 
cil chamber in which Nuremberg's great citi- 
zens, successful merchants, and valiant cap- 
tains took counsel for peace and for war. 
Around that banqueting-hall, blazoned on its 
walls, is the tale of Nuremberg's greatness. 
There the great fresco speaks of her past life 
and glory, her wealth, her power, her inde- 
pendence, her artistic genius. And in the most 
natural way, mingled with this record, is the 
story of her unconscious cruelty, too. The tale 
of tortured criminal stands written on the wall 
as plainly as the glory of the lordly merchant. 
With equal truth they are drawn side by side. 
As you stand in the hall, the golden light fall- 
ing through wide windows, rich in glass, it 
is easy to think yourself back in the time when 
what was richest, wisest, fairest, bravest, and 
best in that central city of Europe met and 
feasted where now you stand. But what an- 
other story is hidden beneath the great stone 
floor! Go down a few feet, and there, for your 
inspection, open up whole rows of cells. Oh, 



186 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

such cells! Noisome, dank, impenetrated by 
a single sun-ray. There in darkness, utter and 
profound, men, and women, too, were impris- 
oned, tortured, put to death ; while a foot above 
their heads, the solid stone shutting out all 
sound of revelry from above or of wail from 
below, the great citizens feasted and drank, 
planned wars and discussed commerce. 

Could such things be to-day? We smile at 
the idea ; it is an insult to imagine it possible. 
And yet those men and women that feasted 
were not specially bad men and women ; nor 
did those poor wretches who suffered beneath 
own often to any worse sin than misfortune. 
Why has the former state of things passed 
away ? I tell you, brothers, there is but one 
reason — it is the advance of the tide of " the 
mind of Christ.' ' Year by year, it seemed, to 
those who watched it, to ebb as often as to 
flow. Slowly, very slowly, it rose on the sands, 
and as each watcher failed at his post, his tes- 
timony as to its rising was all too uncertain to 
assure him who took his place. But there was 
no ebb for all that. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 187 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 

Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

And not by eastern windows only, 

"When daylight comes, comes in the light ; 

In front, the sun climbs slow — how slowly ! 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 

It is rising still. I tell you the time will come 
— I believe it is near at hand — when it will 
be impossible for men and women to live, 
as even now they are living, in the broad and 
beautiful houses of our great cities, surround- 
ing themselves there with all the rich gifts and 
bounty of life, while close to them hundreds 
of thousands of their fellow citizens are shut 
down within the pestiferous narrowness of the 
tenement-house or the sweat-shop. It will be as 
impossible for things which exist to-day to con- 
tinue to exist side by side in our cities and 
land as it would be to fill Nuremberg's broad 
hall in this twentieth century with feasting cit- 
izens, while her dungeons beneath were choked 
with the victims of her torture. Yes, love is 
casting out strife, is taking the bitterness out 



188 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

of competition. Love recognizes to-day, as she 
never did before, misfortune as establishing a 
claim on fortune, and sorrow and suffering as 
pleas from which an honorable man must never 
turn away, if he would hope for the favor, not 
only of a merciful God, but of his own justi- 
fying conscience. 

Again I ask, Why is this? It is because the 
mind of Christ is increasingly becoming a 
power among men. But as I seek to set before 
you the reasonableness and certainty and com- 
ing prevalence of this mind of Christ, I shall 
perhaps be accused of sentimentalism. The 
plea I make, you say, is sentimental. Is it so ? 
I would have you remember that it is not the 
voice of religion alone that calls you to-day to 
make the mind of Christ a power in your own 
lives and in the world. What science to-day, 
in the interest she excites, and in the splendid 
triumphs she has won, takes more prominent 
place than does physiology in all her branches ? 
We might call her the regnant science to-day. 
It requires little more than a knowledge of 
first principles of physiology to assure our- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 189 

selves that this youngest of all the sciences 
calls on those who follow her deliberately to 
accept self-sacrifice as their law. Somewhat 
heady with her own intoxicating success, she 
stands before the world to-day. " Listen to 
me," she seems to say ; " let me speak. I may 
be the youngest in the class, but I have some- 
thing important to say." And when she does 
tell of her own things, with a captivating 
vigor of youth and enthusiasm cast around 
her, what is the burden of her testimony ? In- 
voluntary sacrifice in the lowest orders of 
life — voluntary sacrifice in the highest forms 
of life. This is her testimony, her message, 
her gospel. In these highest she calls it altruism. 
It is really " the mind of Christ." " You," 
she cries to those who listen to her — " you 
are the result of age-long processes of sacri- 
fice ; fall in with the law that made you what 
you are. Let this mind be in you : forego your 
own advantage, and, doing so, win your high- 
est life." 

Or listen with me for a moment to another 
voice of weight, that in no special sense claims 



190 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

to be religious. Listen to the voice of history. 
This teacher, too, has the confidence of youth, 
of youth renewed at least. She tells us that 
we are only beginning to understand how to 
place together in their proper order and se- 
quence the lessons of the past. "In physics," 
she cries, " you have fixed laws, laws by which 
you can judge certainly of nature's sequences. 
By these the tides rise and fall, the winds come 
and go, light follows darkness, and the glory 
of the spring the rigor of the winter. To the 
aid of these and the conduct of them the will 
of man is not necessary. Seed-time and har- 
vest, day and night, snow and heat, summer 
and winter, shall not fail." But in the con- 
duct of his own affairs, it is vitally necessary 
that man take into his consideration the prop- 
erty and responsibility of his own will. Na- 
ture mates herself to that will. She aids man 
so long as he struggles. She is to him a sturdy 
helpmeet. She will not live with him, however, 
as a sloven. She will marry him, but not slave 
for him. If he neglect her, she withdraws her 
forces, her vital warmth from him. Whether 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 191 

it is an individual or a generation of individ- 
uals, this is true of man's relations to her. She 
will give man no assurance of faithfulness on 
her part, and permanent support springing 
from that faithfulness, if he continue faith- 
less to her. She will help her mate, man, to 
prepare for each generation a more favorable 
environment in some respects than the pre- 
vious generation had. Intellectually, morally, 
the atmosphere, the environment may be more 
favorable. But let that generation, thus kindly 
greeted and provided for by nature, fail of its 
duty, cease to do its part, be lacking in some 
essential requirement, and the higher platform 
to which it has been lifted serves but to pre- 
pare the way for a more disastrous and irre- 
mediable fall. The comparative study of his- 
tory makes it abundantly evident to the student 
of to-day that each generation can do no more 
for its successor than provide it with a stout 
platform on which to battle out its own des- 
tiny, wrestle for its life, prove its own worthi- 
ness to exist, save its own soul from the death. 
At first sight, there seems little that favors 



192 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

the Christ mind in the conclusions of historic 
science. Look a little closer and you will see 
that this is not so. The very essence of that 
mind is willingness, for the good of others, to 
forego its own legitimate advantage. When 
first a few ignorant and weak men dared to 
proclaim such mind as the final type of human 
mind, what state of things were they confronted 
by ? There was spread all over the known 
world a civilization marvellous in its success. 
Seemingly it was established forever. It had 
founded itself on the ruin of all previous civ- 
ilizations. It had borrowed from their experi- 
ences ; it had been warned by their failures. 
Its rule seemed as eternal as the hills of its 
own capital city. And why? Men great and 
small, old men and children, had lived, planned 
toiled, fought, and been willing to die for 
Borne; and rich in the self-sacrifice of her 
children, Rome stood forth steady and strong 
beyond compare. She rose, flourished, and 
blessed mankind. But Rome grew rich and 
wanton; both rich and poor alike sunk into 
selfishness. The poor cried only for bread and 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 193 

pleasure, and the rich for pleasure and power ; 
and so the crash of it all soon came. For Rome 
was but the husk of herself. She had turned 
to her muck-heap, and forgotten the glory of 
her early crown. The fair became foul, the 
wife a wanton, justice was sold, honor fled, 
the mind of Christ was openly scoffed at. She 
fell and her fall was great. Innocent and guilty 
fell together, for the hope of mankind had 
been betrayed by Rome. On her wreck and 
ruin, after a time of doubt and dismay, larger 
foundations of liberty and hope for mankind 
arose. For in Frank, Goth, and Visigoth, and 
in all the so-called wave of barbarism which 
had swept over her, possibilities of higher life 
were existent which were no longer possible to 
her. On these Christianity took hold. Their 
young lives were her new seed-bed. 

It is not doubtful that real advance has 
been made towards the realization by man of 
" the mind of Christ." In regard to its law, we 
no longer stand where our forefathers stood. 
We may fail sadly still, but we aim at higher 
things than they, we judge ourselves by a 



194 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

higher standard. Our ideals, at least, are less 
self-seeking. To prove this would not be dif- 
ficult, but as time fails me, I must content my- 
self by merely stating it. 

The law of sacrifice explained and illus- 
trated in his matchless life — sealed by his 
lonely dying — is the gift Jesus gave to men. 
Jesus of course used the language and similes 
he best knew when he taught it. Paul had 
other learning than that of Jesus, and looked 
forth on an enlarged world. Consequently the 
Pauline method and similes are not those Jesus 
himself employed. The Christian churches — 
as I have repeatedly said to you — still too 
often feel themselves obliged to use only 
those methods, similes, forms of expression, 
that Jesus knew and used, — or Paul or the 
early Fathers knew and used, — and have thus 
failed to make reasonable and cogent their 
appeal to modern times. For instance, science 
really is doing far more to commend the law 
of sacrifice, the law of the " mind of Christ " 
to men to-day, than all its professed followers 
and nominal advocates; not always because 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 195 

these last are not sincere and intelligent, but 
because the terms they use sound uncouth and 
unreal to educated men. 

We have not ceased to believe in the ne- 
cessity of sacrifice. Good men in all religions, 
wise men in all nations, know well that the 
law of sacrifice is a vital and changeless law, 
but clinging to the nomenclature of the long 
past, seeking to explain the sacrificial life in 
terms out of date, the so-called Christian sys- 
tem of sacrifice, appears unreal and absurd, 
and often unmoral as well. Orthodox termin- 
ology to-day still is the same as that employed 
by good men whose conceptions of sacrifice 
found their most natural illustrations in the 
shambles, in lowing herds and blood-sprinkled 
altars. These to them seemed the natural way 
of approach to God. 

Such terms as justification, expiation, atone- 
ment, imputed righteousness, transferred sin 
had once for sacrificing men a tremendous 
meaning. To use them to-day is but to be- 
wilder and estrange those who are honestly 
seeking to conform their faulty and selfish 



196 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

lives to self-sacrifice's changeless and univer- 
sal law. Of that law Jesus' life and dying are 
still the supreme illustration, but orthodoxy 
now veils from the minds of multitudes the 
real significance of both. 

As St. Paul handles the law of sacrifice in 
the passage I have read to you, it is as fresh 
and full of meaning for us to-day as it ever 
was. The Saviour, whom St. Paul speaks of as 
crowned with everlasting glory, and before 
whose august feet all things in heaven and 
earth do bow and obey, sits on the throne of 
his universe, not by favor, but by right. He 
is exalted because he alone has explained and 
vindicated its universal law. The whole uni- 
verse, animate and inanimate, bends in hom- 
age to him because he has made glorious its 
own supreme law — the law of sacrifice and 
of service. Through all the dark and vapor- 
ous gray ages of the past, that law has' slowly 
worked out its painful processes. It had been 
sobbed in the universe, ages before it was 
revealed on the cross of Christ. This is the 
force of St. Paul's "Wherefore." Who shall 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 197 

justify to the universe her sorrow, toil, pain, 
dying? Who shall stand and explain her long, 
long travail pang? Man, and only man. 
Only a Man-Child glorious can pay the poor 
earth back for her long-drawn-out travail pang. 
Without man nature is inexplicable. And 
man stands confused before himself, uncer- 
tain of whence he came and whither he goes, 
incapable of explaining and justifying what 
he is, and what he wants to be, till the highest 
Man stands before him and says: "I am the 
way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh 
to the Father but by me. See in me the ex- 
planation of all that you see, and feel, and 
hope for in yourself." 

" Therefore God hath highly exalted him." 
The life of Christ is the final type, and there- 
fore no other life can be finally successful. 
There can be no two victorious types. The 
final life must be the fitted life. The unfitted 
must cease to be. The life that lives in its true 
relations, — to permit any other life than this 
to survive would be to undo what the ages 
have been doing ; would be to reverse the law 



198 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

by which the lower die, that the higher may 
flourish. God himself cannot make a world 
in which the saurian exists side by side with 
man. Saurians are the best possible forms of 
life at one stage, yet impossible at the next. 
The conditions of the saurian are the condi- 
tions of the Carboniferous age ; these would 
but choke and strangle the man. To persist 
in conditions is the meaning of sin. A uni- 
verse favorable to the highest must of neces- 
sity be less favorable to that which is not so 
high. The mind of Christ and the selfish spirit 
of self-seeking cannot finally co-exist. Which 
is to be in us, brothers ? After which mind 
shall we live ? 

So let me conclude as I began. All that 
this university stands for, these friendships 
made, these halcyon days in which are so de- 
lightfully mingled the spring and zest of boy- 
hood, with the growing sense of power that 
belongs to early manhood — all can avail you 
but little, if the chief value of them you let 
slip, if the abiding result of them is not found 
with you. That result should be a deeper 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 199 

knowledge than is possible to others who have 
not had your advantages — a knowledge of 
what goes to make manhood worthy and true 
living possible. Your outlook on life should 
surely be not less sympathetic than that of 
other men because of these splendid oppor- 
tunities that you have enjoyed. It is men the 
hour calls for, men who know themselves to 
have a mission, and who can and will turn 
away from all other prizes to win that one life 
prize ; from all other siren voices to listen to 
that " one clear call for me." 

Oh, my brothers, you come not here to 
complete your life studies, but to fit yourselves 
to pursue them. The study you have known 
here has, if it be worth anything, cost you 
something. The study that awaits you in the 
great world will surely cost you more. " Look 
not on your own things " — not to your own 
aggrandizement, nor the building of your for- 
tune — but look on men, and you will learn 
to know them a little, and, as you know, to 
love them more. Pursue pleasure and it will 
pall on you. Give your soul up to toil, and 



200 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

work will become some day unendurable. But 
the man who gives out his best to his fellow 
man is never utterly cast down or disheart- 
ened. No numbing cares can quite paralyze 
the reverent student of men. Falls and fail- 
ures he may make ; but from them all, like 
the fabled Antaeus of old, he will rise re- 
freshed, for he has touched his fellow. " Look 
not on your own things," and you will learn 
to love, love with a discriminating hopeful- 
ness that rises above all disappointments, and 
year by year discovers promise of a life that 
is worth living. 

I have visited all the cities and all the states 
in this great land of ours ; but from out them 
all, to my mind, one building stands preemi- 
nently beautiful and eloquent. It is the Me- 
morial Hall at Harvard. It tells the story of 
a college generation that earnestly looked on 
the things of others. It tells the story of brave 
deeds following that persistent looking. They 
had their hour, those men of fifty years ago, 
and they heard their call. A golden haze of 
distance already hangs over that past time. It 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 201 

seems to us very glorious, but also very sim- 
ple, very easy. They could not have done 
other than they did. Ah, that is how problems 
of one age always look to the next. It did not 
seem so to them. Partings had to be made, 
prejudices met, and deep questionings an- 
swered ; yet out of them all they passed tri- 
umphant. They did their duty, suffered and 
died, many of them, before they knew they 
had won. How ? What mind was theirs in 
that momentous hour, in those desperate years 
of civil strife ? It was the law of sacrifice, it 
was the mind of Christ. The cause was man's, 
the end his salvation ; and the means, the only 
means, sacrifice. Man never could be, never 
can be, saved by any other. If you would 
save him, you must die for him. 

Have not many of you often looked on the 
old war monuments, and wished with all your 
hearts that a duty as simple and direct as the 
duty of those days was yours to-day? wished 
that you, too, could hear a voice that called, 
and know it to be divine? But uncertainty sur- 
rounds you, checks you, benumbs you. It is 



202 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

hard to find the truth, hard to know what to 
do. On sociological questions we are at sea ; on 
theological, we are divided ; on political, we 
sometimes fiercely differ. We often feel deeply 
with Matthew Arnold : — 

But now the old is out of date, 
The new is not yet born. 

Brothers, as your chosen preacher, feeling 
the solemnity of this occasion, one that can- 
not recur in my life or yours again, I call on 
you, by all that is highest and holiest, all that 
in your own nature answers and echoes God, 
I call on you to put before you, as an end and 
object in your life, the knowledge and the ser- 
vice of men, — not of classmates or of partners 
only, but of men unlike yourself, environed 
differently, differently endowed. Begin to do 
this now, try to do it faithfully. More light 
and a clearer call shall be yours by and by. 
Look earnestly not on your own things, but 
on the things of others. Look on man, God's 
last and highest work, and in that work you 
will learn to see and reverence divine purpose. 
Give men your mind, give them your hand, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 203 

and you cannot in time withhold your heart. 
Know the ignorant, to teach them ; know the 
weak, to help them ; those who are out of the 
way, to lead them back. Oh, get to know the 
boys in the great cities, and share with them 
some of those priceless advantages that have 
enlarged your life. Know the wounded, to 
heal them, the sorrowing to comfort them. 
Know the sinful, to forgive and save them. 
Only set yourselves by the help of God to this 
lifelong purpose, cost what it may. Sacrifice 
time, self-interest, ambition, and fortune to it 
— set yourselves, I say, to know men; and you 
have laid the foundation for a life that can- 
not fail, and a hope that shall not be disap- 
pointed. 



204 THE REASONABLENESS OF 



VI 



JESUS' DOCTRINE OF MAN'S APPROACH TO GOD 



If thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us. 
Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible 
to him that believeth. — Mark ix, 22, 23. 

For the sake of clearness, will you pardon 
me if I recapitulate a little in this my last ad- 
dress to you. I have tried to show you that 
the message of good news Jesus brought to 
men has of necessity undergone many changes 
since he delivered it and we in our day re- 
ceived it. Yet in spite of all change the vital 
germ of it, the all-important part of it, the 
seed of it, is unquestionably ours still. We need 
it as bread for our own souls, and as living 
seed which we too must sow afresh for the 
harvesting of those who come after us. 

Our view of the world in which we live is not 
in many ways the view Jesus, as a Jew, held. 
Yet different, profoundly different though 
that view be, I have tried to show you that we 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 205 

cannot part with Jesus, we need not part with 
Jesus, with his hopes, with his standards, with 
his doctrine of the nature of man and of God, 
or with his teachings as to man's place and 
duty in the world. 

As I said, before I speak of what Jesus 
meant by faith, " man's way of approach to 
God," let me for clearness' sake restate briefly 
what most thoughtful Christian men would 
agree, I think, in believing to be man's place 
in the world. This world in which we live and 
play our brief part is God's world, created, 
guided, upheld, and saved by God. His life is 
its life. To believe this must profoundly in- 
fluence our ideas as to our place in it and our 
duty to it. Resolutely we must lay aside as in- 
adequate and untrue theories based on the 
world's independence of God and opposition to 
God. (This, be it remembered, the early Chris- 
tians were not always successful in doing — 
instance the apocalyptic literature of early 
times.) 

Unless we hold this attitude firmly, we 
must be prepared to find ourselves in opposi- 



206 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

tjon to the scientific spirit, and to much that 
is best in that earnest attitude of reverent re- 
search — to which our time owes so much. 
This modern spirit is, as I have tried to show 
you, " of the mind of Christ," and should be 
greeted as an ally and not as an opponent. 
Christendom as a whole is as yet far from ac- 
cepting this truth ; not even in theory are we 
always prepared to say with Jesus and with 
Paul, " We are fellow workers with God." 
They long ago saw that this was the real 
meaning of man's life on earth, and joy and 
confidence came to those much persecuted men 
as they declared it. But we are privileged to 
see as they could not, that not only were the 
followers of Jesus so working, but that all 
good men everywhere — and not men only, 
but the very nature of things — were working 
for the light and against the darkness, for 
God and against self-will and evil. 

It may surprise you, but it is none the less 
true, that in our country and in our times 
there is a distinct reaction against these best, 
clearest, earliest teachings of Jesus. There is 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 207 

a harking-back to the dualism of long ago; 
and people who loudly claim to be walking by 
the aid of new lights are repeating very old 
and very gross errors. 

God, they say, is to be found outside ordin- 
ary physical conditions, rather than in them. 
With great variety and confusion of language, 
it is declared that only by ignoring, overcom- 
ing, and denying these, rather than by study- 
ing and accepting them, can man win his 
vision of God. These modern mystics cannot 
bring themselves to believe that the earth is 
the true field of man's life — as it was of the 
Master's life; that it is the garden in which 
the gardener walks and talks with God. This 
very old misconception of man's relation to 
the world has taken, in different ages, varying 
forms of expression. To-day, it is taking 
newer, but none the less mistaken and hurtful 
forms. The Christian Scientist denies stoutly 
the reality of his body. He goes a little fur- 
ther than his forbears of the fourth and fifth 
centuries, and says his real life can be won only 
by denying the actuality of the material life. 



208 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

The material universe is to him non-existent. 
God is spirit, and is revealed only in the 
spiritual. All material things are but hin- 
drances and illusions. 

This and some other even cruder forms of 
mysticism are all based on the same faulty 
conception of God's relation to the universe 
and of man's place in it. The mystic religion- 
ist, the spiritual medium, the half-cheating 
clairvoyant, the Christian Scientist healer and 
expounder are but separate companies in one 
regiment, many hundreds of years old, one 
and all of them seeking an outside God, not 
the real, reasonable God, ever self-revealing in 
the natural order of the universe, and so in 
human life. They turn from the Father of 
spirits and of men, the God of evolution and 
of history, to the God who speaks in "the 
sign" 

The God and Father of Jesus is the God 
who owns and sustains the world. He is as 
much present here as in heaven. The present 
life is God's as truly as the unknown life be- 
yond the grave. To deny this, to ignore it, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 209 

separates the religious faculty from the rest 
of man's faculties. It is an effort to live outside 
God's chosen environment for man, and pre- 
cludes his being the one thing he is evidently 
called to be, here and now (whatever he may 
be called to be or do hereafter), an intelligent 
and loving fellow worker with God, under 
bodily conditions, in an actual world where 
he is limited by time and space. 

This world, in the teachings of Jesus, is not 
immoral, but as yet unmoral, waiting the seed 
of truth; the nature of things not evil, but 
potentially good; the animal not opposed to 
the divine, but God's animal, awaiting enlight- 
enment through the divine. Jesus is in his 
Father's world, and he knows it. God has al- 
ways worked in it, and works in it now, and 
Jesus, as he lives in it, is continuing his Fa- 
ther's works, the works he was sent to do. His 
life-blood is the very life-blood of the world's 
life, is a part of that life, and grows as it 
grows. To save that world for its highest needs 
and purposes — for this he gladly lays down 
his life. Here he leads men. Here he explains 



210 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

to us men our vocation, our ministry; shows 
us, as nobody ever did or could, man's true 
place in the world. All things are for man. 
When man comes, he comes to control, and 
his control is beneficent. His work is to change 
the beautiful, savage earth into a beautiful, 
fruitful world. He must everywhere play the 
god whether he will or not — sometimes, alas, 
it is a devil god he plays, but ruler he is ever. 
The beautiful legend of Genesis is true to the 
core. The world is given to man. In it he but 
makes good his divine title ; no one will do his 
work for him — not even God. The seas have 
their work, the seasons fulfil their destiny. 
Forces known and unknown, operative in the 
world, are yet all subordinate to man, the 
earth's lord ; he is its engineer, its director ; he 
the controller of all its forces. And just as the 
wise father will leave his son unaided, often, 
to work out his boyish tasks, or grapple with 
the problems of early manhood, so God will 
not put an interfering hand to the great busi- 
ness. Appalled by its greatness, abashed by 
his own mistakes, the tragedies, the disasters 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 211 

attending them, again and again man cries for 
an interfering grace; but it may not be. Is 
it cruel thus to leave him alone? Nay, infinite 
wisdom and love knows its necessity. We send 
our boys to school, and a hard task it is, 
harder for the love that sends them to endure 
its part of the task than for the boy so sent; 
but the boy's life has to be lived in its own 
way, and under its wisely chosen conditions. 
The strangeness and the loneliness of school 
have to be met, and in conquering these and 
reaping the opportunities that go with them, 
the lad takes his successful steps towards man- 
hood. We are in our own small way copying 
the great Master all the time, and as we copy 
we do well. It is not cruel to leave man to his 
tasks alone. Infinite love and wisdom have 
proved that long ago, and sorrow, loss, defeat, 
pain, and sure death ending it all, these can- 
not be done away with. At view of them often 
we stand doubtful and discouraged. But 
heavenly interference we shall never have — 
for only thus can we win our mastery. 

Let me put it simply by way of illustration. 



212 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

I have a farm in Connecticut. One day, long 
years ago, I noticed a wild bit of land hard 
by. It was rough and woody, there was swamp 
and marshland too, a spring spread itself into 
a little bog ; many thorns and thistles there 
were, with a few wild flowers among them. 
But a man with will to work and knowledge 
how to work came that way, and the swamp 
gave place to a spring, the tangled thicket be- 
came a woodland. Where once the roughest 
sort of pasturage lay, a rich field with its 
crop of hay and grain arose; and soon a home- 
stead and garden were there too. This is what 
man can do. This is what man was sent to do. 
Here is a living picture of man's place in the 
world. The thicket was not without a beauty 
of its own, but the woodland was better. In 
the marsh there was native beauty, but the 
clear spring and flowery meadow were better. 
The farmhouse and fruitful garden meant a 
higher presence and a greater good. All the 
possibilities of fruitfulness and of beauty in 
home-making were there in the wild neglected 
tract. All they wanted was a man to call them 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 213 

forth. To this work God ever calls his farmer 
children. To push my illustration a little fur- 
ther, this too makes plain the relationship of 
Jesus to the rest of mankind. Christ's place is 
inside the race, not outside it ; with us in all 
our experiences, not outside our experiences. 
He explains to us our own possibilities, re- 
veals to us our own life ; has only come that 
we may have our own life more abundantly 
than we have had it before. All the coarser, 
earlier elements of the world are in us. In us, 
too, waiting for his call and leadership, are 
the higher, holier, humaner things waiting to 
be born. Even the lower in us is God's lower 
waiting God's higher ; not the immoral man, 
but the unmoral man. If we will go with him, 
follow and obey him in working towards the 
higher, we are just like the farmer at what at 
first seemed his unthankful and hopeless task. 
If we insist on going back to the days of primi- 
tive man, we go back to the beasts — and 
there is sin; if we obey the spiritual, we rise 
to Christ — and there is the divine ; but one 
grows out of the other in orderly process. The 



214 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

spiritual is the evolution of the primitive. 
We grow as the world grows from lower to 
higher, from slaveship to sonship. Neglect 
the farm, and the fields drop back to the 
thicket, the spring sinks again into the marsh- 
land, the weed chokes the garden, the fruit 
trees planted with so much care go back to 
the crab-tree, and the lower denizens of the 
wild return. 

Oh, is it not a reasonable work, a lovely and 
a free service ! Let us take his view and follow 
him, " fellow workers with God," as Paul 
dared to call it long ago, carrying out his pur- 
poses to a certain and a splendid end. But, 
oh, mark me ! There is no mere law in all 
this, no mere inevitable good, no unsought 
salvation ever won, no mere blind law ever 
working, but millions of free, self-determining 
wills; not one Christ, but many; not God doing 
things for us as though we were parts of a 
machine, but God the Father doing things by 
us, giving us more power, more knowledge, 
more light, more freedom, more responsibility, 
as we are fit for them. And the rule, the law, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 215 

the way by which we can alone do these things 
worth doing is — Faith. Here is the old, old 
subject. Is it a reasonable demand ? Can or- 
dinary men comply with it ? Can all men ex- 
ercise this working faith ? Of all questions 
the thoughtful man is called on to face, there 
can, I think, be none more important than 
this. There are those — not a few — who tell 
us faith is waning. On the other hand, there 
are many, at least as competent to form a 
judgment, who confidently assert that our age 
is preeminently one of faith. Goethe says the 
ages of belief are the only fruitful ages, and 
history backs his opinion. If faith is slowly 
waning from the earth, and the most pro- 
gressive peoples are learning to live without 
it, the fact is one of gravest significance. If, 
on the other hand, it is only the antiquated 
and infirm forms of faith (her cast-off gar- 
ments) that are passing, cast aside as things 
no longer usable, while the real body and life 
of faith are quick and vital, then the time is 
ripe for new and simpler definitions of what 
our honored forbears called " saving faith." 



216 THE REASONABLENESS Otf 

With this last view I am very heartily in 
accord, and to-day I wish to insist that faith 
as demanded by Jesus Christ never was meant 
to be adhesion to any credal statement, but a 
vital obedience to and trust in a living man, 
who in his person and teaching revealed two 
things as they never had been revealed before 
— the nature of man and the nature of God. 

First of all, I ask you to consider that Jesus 
wins from all sorts of people the response of 
faith that he desires. The most unpromising 
win their way to him and gain his approval. 
He expects to find good in men, to find some- 
thing worth helping and saving in them, and 
to find this worthiness in the most unlikely 
places. 

In order to understand what Jesus meant 
and what he taught about faith, we must re- 
fuse to separate his acts and his words. We 
must put acts and words together, and then 
what he does will illustrate what he says. 
Here, I venture to think, Christian men have 
very often failed. 

We take a word of his — this word faith, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 217 

belief ; we find that to those who have it and 
exercise it he constantly makes such promises 
as these : " All things are possible to him that 
belie veth " ; " He that belie veth on the Son 
hath everlasting life " ; " He that belie veth 
on me, though he were dead, yet shall he 
live. ,, No words seem too strong when he 
seeks to express his fear for those who have 
it, and exercise it not : " He that believeth not 
shall not see life, but the wrath of God abid- 
eth on him " ; and a multitude of similar 
passages. We remember these passages, but 
we forget the circumstances in which they 
were spoken. Did we remember them, the 
circumstances would illuminate and make their 
meaning plain. These, however, we ignore, 
and the unfortunate result arises that, before 
we are aware of it, faith seems to become an 
unreal, impossible thing, a demand with which 
we cannot comply, a possession which but few 
have. Thus it fades, and the Christianity of 
which it is the root and spirit, fades too. 

Notice, then, that from all sorts of people 
— the learned and the unlearned, the stranger 



218 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

of a day and the lifelong friend, the disciple 
who clings to him, and the casual visitor who 
comes to him only for some one thing, and, 
having got it, goes away — from all alike 
Jesus demands faith and belief. He will have 
no dealings with men without it. 

In word or act of Jesus we can find no pre- 
cedent for the state of things which we have 
brought about to-day. We have made faith 
seem difficult ; so difficult that multitudes of 
our very best men and women turn from the 
Church, because in their souls they believe it 
is impossible for them to yield to the demand 
which the Church makes on them for faith. 
They are just as good as the Church people 
from whose company they turn ; as kind to 
their children, as faithful in their loves and 
friendships, as scrupulously honest in their 
lives, as fervent in their patriotism, as ready 
to serve and suffer for their fellow men. Their 
aims are the aims of all good men and women, 
and yet they are turning away sadly or indif- 
ferently from the Church and from Christ. 
And why are they doing it ? Because we have 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 219 

made his claims on them appear to be claims 
with which they cannot in their conscience feel 
it is right to comply. 

This is nothing less than a perverting of 
the known character of Jesus, an unlawful 
reversal of his method and unfaithful pre- 
sentation of his message. So far as we have 
achieved this result we have not been faithful 
witnesses to God for our own time and gener- 
ation. I claim not only a word or a text here 
and there in the inspired records, but the whole 
lifelong conduct of Jesus, in proof of the truth 
of what I have said, that when he demanded 
faith and belief from men, he demanded some- 
thing which he thought the everyday man 
was able to give. 

Let us notice, then, that our Lord came 
not to create barriers between God and men, 
to thrust man farther from God, to call the 
few to their Father. His yoke was easy, his 
burden was light, the door of his feast stood 
wide open, the wanderers in waysides and 
hedges were welcome therein. When he sowed 
the seed of the kingdom, the rocky road, the 



220 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

choking thorn, the barren hillside as well as 
the fruitful earth, liberally received the golden 
grain. He sought no rare possession like gen- 
ius in man. No; he fastened on some common 
gift, the most universal, when he appealed to 
faith and belief. This was Jesus' fixed con- 
viction. Every little child, he said, had faith 
naturally within, and could substantially ex- 
ercise it. In Christ's view to demand faith is 
to make no unfairly difficult demand. 

Nor can belief be confused with credulity. 
This Jesus rebukes again and again. Cred- 
ulity turns the soul into an ash-heap on which 
are cast together all sorts of things good and 
bad, and all alike are wasted. Credulity is 
not clear-eyed, but blear-eyed. Credulity abases 
judgment. Credulity is a traveller without a 
guide, or one with a hundred guides, who is 
trying to follow them all in turn. He blunders 
round in a circle, makes no progress, and wins 
no goal either of character or of attainment. 

Nor can faith, as Jesus demands it, be the 
development of ourselves at the cost of some 
one part of ourselves (though this fallacy has 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 221 

been taught again and again), at the cost of 
that part of us by which we know and judge 
of all other things — our reason. Faith cannot 
be created, called out, developed, at the cost 
of reason; for to play off our faith against 
our reason is to raise a civil war in man, de- 
structive, fratricidal, and unnatural. 

I would like in passing to recall what Lord 
Bacon says about this : " It were better," he 
says, " to have no opinion at all of God than 
such an opinion as is unworthy of him: for 
the one is unbelief, the other contumely.' ' He 
then goes on to illustrate : " Plutarch said well, 
' I would rather a great deal men said there 
was no such man as Plutarch at all than that 
they should say there was one, Plutarch, who 
would eat his own children as soon as born.' " 
For this was what the priests of Saturn taught 
that Saturn did. 

In the light, then, of the plain practice of 
Jesus as told to us in the Evangelists, I think 
it is evident that there were three things faith 
was not : not difficult or rare, not credulous, 
and in no way opposed to reason. 



222 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

Now see how this wonderful story of the 
transfigured Christ coming down from the 
mountain to relieve his sorely confused and 
beset disciples, and help the father in his mis- 
ery and the son in his epilepsy, illustrates what 
Jesus would have us believe that faith is. No- 
tice first that here Christ confronts all that is 
most hopeless in life. He is face to face with 
life's tragedy; for here we see a father's mis- 
ery, a son's insanity, a disciple's stupidity, 
while round the spectacle gathers the helpless, 
gaping crowd. A father is crying for help, 
such help as love needs for its loved ones. The 
cry is the cry of need, of need for another, 
for another's pain. Most of us have felt it — 
pain so much deeper, sharper, more unbearably 
bitter than any pain of our own. It is the cry 
of him who has tried all known methods, tested 
all panaceas, and won no relief. His long 
course of disappointment has robbed him of 
all faith. Expectation even is almost dead. 
Hear him speak for himself. "If thou canst 
do any thing, have pity upon us and help us." 
But this is not the only misery that confronts 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 223 

the Lord. Here is a son's insanity, the very 
quintessence of earthly failure. How weary 
we sometimes grow of failure, weary of bear- 
ing the burden of failure which is the result 
of our own miscalculation or sin. But harder 
still is it to confront hopefully that heavy 
burden of failure which seems to weigh on 
the world from no immediate fault of its own 
— failure the result of some hidden deed, some 
forgotten sin of long ago, an hereditary taint 
handed down, bringing forth at last its bitter 
Dead Sea fruit. 

But another failure confronts Jesus here, 
a failure more near and intimate. His chosen 
disciples, whose great task lies before them as 
yet unattempted, they who must minister to 
pain, they who, inspired by him, must go forth 
to heal earth's failures, seeking to uplift and 
inspire those multitudes of men whom it is so 
hard permanently to touch, — these men have 
failed in their efforts to help the boy. What 
promise is this for the work before them? For 
these men must be not only soldiers sharing 
the dangers of the field, but while they fight 



224 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

they must bring succour. They must be invinc- 
ible veterans righting with one hand, and 
bearing the wounded to shelter with the other. 
So we behold our Lord confronted by the 
human need of the father's misery, the son's 
insanity, and the sad incapacity of earthly 
ministry. What does Christ do ? It is all-im- 
portant that we should know. Something in 
all these men, he says, is put there by God, a 
quality which lies within them, buried and al- 
most lost, perhaps, but still resident, responsive 
to meet just such occasions as these. The most 
real of all human need carries, Christ teaches 
us, the cure for its want in its own bosom. 
Belief lies almost dead there among those men 
because unused for so long. But father and 
disciple alike, even in the face of such dif- 
ficulties, can exercise a trust so vital, so warm, 
so strong that not only can they stand up in 
it and conquer for themselves, but the influ- 
ence of their own faith can work the deliver- 
ance from what seems to be a hopeless failure, 
and break the ties that have bound this boy 
in darkness from his cradle. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 225 

And what is this belief which Jesus demands 
and calls into exercise, which he challenges, 
and which immediately comes forth in obedi- 
ence to his challenge ? He does not enter into 
disquisition or definition of it. He does not 
even say, " Believe in me." It is just belief in 
God, belief that he is good, not bad ; that he 
is near, not far ; that he is loving, not indiffer- 
ent ; that he is all-powerful, not powerless ; 
belief that he is the sort of God, in short, that 
the distracted father, the imbecile son, and 
the despairing disciple really want, if they 
will but have it so : a God who cares. 

Jesus tells them that they do believe in 
God, that they have always believed in God, 
that it is human instinct to have faith in God. 
" Arise and exercise what is your own, and 
all things are possible to him that believeth." 
To convince them of the truth of the great 
power, of the possibilities of the exercise of 
this power within them, Jesus will give them 
a display of divine power. He cannot repeat 
such displays forever : by doing so he would 
make them meaningless. He will not break in 



226 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

on his father's laws, — which are the best 
laws possible for men, — but he will more 
fully reveal those laws; and, therefore, he 
works what people call a miracle. That does 
not mean that he will do a supernatural deed, 
but he will more fully explain the natural. 
He will not alter by one degree any divine 
order, but he will give in his own person an 
illustration of the beauty of the order. He 
will show that it is God's will that misery, in- 
sanity, stupidity should cease to be, and that 
when men are at one with God as he is, these 
old oppressions of earth are powerless to re- 
sist their faithful, God-trusting will. To them, 
then, is entrusted a power before which the 
long entrenched evils of earth shrivel up and 
disappear. 

We know that as long as this Jesus stood 
before men, living the life that inspired them, 
doing the deeds that thrilled them, using the 
old word faith, belief, and breathing into it 
absolutely new meaning, so long did faith to 
the apostles mean the exercise of that spirit- 
ual faculty within them that lived by the life 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS . 227 

of Jesus. They were not believing things about 
him. Day by day they were drawing vigor, 
vision, and virtue from him. And the reason 
why the Gospels are so invaluable to us, and 
no criticisms can ever rob them of their value, 
lies just here — they give to us, in its simple 
beauty, its compelling reasonableness, and its 
utter comprehensiveness, this imperishable 
picture of the Son of man. 

At the bidding of faith man stands forth 
transfigured and transfiguring in his power ; 
for faith is a vast unused capacity inside all 
men. This is the emphasis Christ lays upon 
it : " All things are possible to him that be- 
lieveth. ,, " Look not," he says, " even to me 
for immediate deliverance, call not on some 
new power, seek not to ally yourself with some 
awe-inspiring thing. Can you believe? Be- 
lieve with only a little belief, come with me 
and I will show you. All things are possible 
to him that believeth." 

When Jesus stands beside us and calls on 
us to believe, we sometimes feel that we, too, 
can face all the pathos and tragedy of life as 



228 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

he speaks. Why, then^ have we done so little 
with this divine endowment ? What are we 
doing with it ? Casting it into the lumber- 
room of unused things, or in some pitiful 
way putting it into evidence, as in some 
homes they put the family Bible on a table 
by itself, where you could write with your 
finger on the dusty cover. This, we are told, 
is a day in which faith is waning, and yet 
we believe in many things, believe quite as 
much as any generation before believed, and 
feverishly follow the things we believe. But 
the faith of which Christ spoke, misdirected 
and misused, shrinks within us. Crowded 
out by mean ambition, debased, it loses its 
hold. Starved and untended, it seems to fail 
us at the supreme hour of need. We do not 
take time to believe in God. Perhaps we know 
that once we did believe in him, and we think 
that our belief is with us still ; but some nights 
the wind begins to rise, and we hear the voice 
of the coming storm and our unused faith 
avails us little. 

Ah, some of us have lived in havens land- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 229 

locked. Safely anchored we have been by stem 
and stern, and no storm test of life has been 
possible. We have come to believe that our 
portion in existence must be everlasting seren- 
ity. But no ; we too must front the stress of 
wind and weather, and all we have been and 
done must be tested by the winds that blow, 
the floods that flow, and the rains that beat 
upon the houses of our lives. Friendships only 
built on favors accepted ; deeds that look won- 
derful outside, but are hollow within ; popular 
descriptions of us, with which men flatter us, 
or tickle our vanity while we know them to 
be more than half deceits — what are all of 
these worth ? They are only wreckage before 
the first rockings of that storm. Yet God for 
every soul of man hath prepared that which, 
doth he but use it, will bear him to haven and 
safety. 

I have seen an old boat lie on the shore. 
Well built it had been and well shaped. Its 
lines are fair and strong. There is its rudder; 
oars and sails lie wrapped beneath its thwarts. 
Launch into the wild sea and trust yourself 



230 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

to it, and quickly it sinks with you into the 
salt water. Any child can tell you why. For 
years it has lain unused. The sans have smit- 
ten it and the frosts have cracked it. Its seams 
gape, its timbers part. It is fairly shaped ; it 
was strongly built. It could once carry fifty. 
Now it is only a coffin for one. It has never 
been put to sea. It is no more help than a 
boat painted on canvas. In the hour of trial 
it fails, as all unused, unexercised things must 
fail. So it is with faith. Carefully, wisely, 
firmly within us, the quality and capacity of 
faith has been builded. It was meant to bear 
us through all storms and temptations to a 
fairer, farther shore ; but laid away, forgot- 
ten, unused, it moulders, shrinks, and dries up 
beyond recovery. 

But let us turn and look more deeply into 
the nature of faith, see how it comes to be, 
and why its exercise is so vital to us. You 
judge of a tree by its fruits, not by its leaf or 
even by its flower. You judge of any course 
of events by its results ; a theory, too, a doc- 
trine, a philosophy — nay more, any govern- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 231 

ment or institution. They must all submit to 
the same test. By that they stand or fall. Not 
only is there no fairer test, but there is no 
other test. This, you say, is sound theory. 
Nay, you say it is more than theory — it is 
well-ascertained fact ; for though we may often 
deny and forget it, the nature of things 
around us never forgets it. 

Nature has been working on this line for 
ages untold. She accepts and preserves as 
her instruments only things that successfully 
endure this final test. She has a vast work to 
do, carries on innumerable manufactories un- 
der inconceivably numerous conditions. She 
tries all sorts of tools in her vast workshop, 
and ever and always casts aside all tools that 
break or fail. In the process she piles up 
heaps of failures, but the things she finally 
arrives at — the good things, the useful things, 
beautiful and fitted things — these all have 
stood the test successfully. They are not only 
good, but they keep on improving. In this 
consists their vital goodness. They are all the 
time being tested by competition. 



232 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

How we hated, as boys, our first competi- 
tive examinations. How well we remember the 
long breath we drew when we were through 
the last of them. And yet, when we left the 
examination room, as we thought forever, we 
were only entering the larger examination hall 
of life. When we left the competition of the 
book, study, and paper, we were entering on 
a fiercer test of competition still. For compe- 
tition rules everywhere : in the air and sky, — 
yes, far aloft in the ether, — in the dark earth 
beneath our feet, in the sunless gulfs of the 
sea. Every blade of grass, every ear of corn 
holds its own by competition. The multitud- 
inous things that crawl, that live, that walk, 
that swim, that fly — they are all of them, 
little as we notice it, holding their own pain- 
fully, in circumstances of fierce struggle. And 
so it is that from her vast competition halls 
nature brings forth not only the good but the 
best. Only the best survive, because she ad- 
mits no favoritism in her vast household. 
Her system is absolutely fair. She scorns all 
suggestions of "pull." She loves the strong, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 233 

the fair, the good, and these at their strongest, 
fairest, and best. All lesser goods and fairs 
and strongs are ever making way, under her 
order, for her best, her fairest, and her 
strongest. 

When we denounce competition we de- 
nounce a divinely ordained process for weed- 
ing out the imperfect. Nay, further, we de- 
nounce the only conceivable process by which 
sorrow, pain, imperfection, and at last death 
itself, can be done away. Let us gird up the 
loins of our minds, face facts, and cease cry- 
ing for the moon. By competition we are what 
we are; by competition our children shall be, 
please God, better than we. God's great com- 
petitive examination board is ever in session, 
and through it our nation has been lately 
passing, as you well know. 

The point I want to make is this: This 
faith which Jesus demands of us is a common 
possession. It is a religious instinct which even 
a child possesses; it is acquired by us all as 
all other valuable qualities are, as the result 
of a system of competition. The knowledge 



234 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

of these later times has bidden us hold what 
is old with new reverence. The very fact that 
it is old carries to the thoughtful mind proof 
of its vitality. Its age is the medal on its 
breast, telling of the many victories it has 
won, the struggles in which it has conquered 
things of lesser good than itself. So we value 
what is old, and we call it beautiful, for we 
know it is the result of actual worth, that no 
favoritism of nature has saved it for us. And 
this truth teaches us a new respect for the 
good things around us and within us. They 
are not only ancient ; they are costly, they are 
approved, they have won their right to use 
and a hearing. And the greatest, the most 
lasting, the most universal of these is faith. 

But there is a further reason for valuing 
faith, another proof of its importance. It is not 
sufficient in God's economy that things should 
be old ; they must also be adaptable, for no 
quality or possession, however venerable, that 
lacks this capacity for adaptation can live on ; 
or, to go back to what I have said, can keep 
improving, can keep on holding its own in 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 235 

the competitive examinations of God. And 
therefore the proof of the vitality of faith is 
the measure and magnitude of its adapta- 
bility. Adaptability, in this sense, comes to 
be a greater sign of vitality than age. And 
this adaptability is the preeminent quality of 
faith. When man's condition was low, his faith 
was base-born. It clothed itself in base forms. 
When his moral ideas were undeveloped he 
clothed his ideas of God with his own imper- 
fections. When he was cruel, so was his God ; 
lustful, so was his God; jealous and full of 
hatred to his enemies, his God was a God of 
battles and a jealous God. The reason thought- 
less people to-day find fault with the Bible is 
because the presentations of God which its 
pages bring to us do not agree with our pre- 
sent conceptions of God. If the Bible were 
not full of misconceptions, or old and imper- 
fect conceptions, it could not in any sense be 
the Bible at all. It could not be a true history 
of man's reaching out in earlier times toward 
God. In centuries much later than those 
whose record we have in the Bible, you can 



236 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

note the same process. From Pagan to Puri- 
tan you follow the idea of God, and God is 
chiefly a lawgiver, his chief seat the judgment 
seat, his title the Lord of Hosts. 

But our faith calls, yearns for something 
higher, for a God higher than the lawgiving 
God and the ruling God. Yes, for One whose 
infinite tenderness and mercy can, as the old 
hymn puts it, — 

Make the dying bed 

Feel soft as downy pillows are. 

So in the Bible and, since the Bible was 
written, still on in human history, faith gath- 
ers up all the broken lights that have come 
from God, all the thoughts which men have 
in their best hours worthily formed of him ; 
gathers them from the artist yearning for his 
beauty ; from the poet divining his meaning ; 
from the philosopher thirsting for his truth ; 
yes, from misunderstood heresiarch, reformer, 
and martyr. From all religions and all histo- 
ries, faith gathers them up, and sees in the 
teachings of Jesus the explanation and vindi- 
cation of them all. Old and new, changing 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 237 

because it lives, who can fix for it a birth- 
date ? Who can set any boundary for its ad- 
vancing tide? Man's hunger for and appre- 
ciation of God, — so the Son of man explains 
to us the universal instinct. We are not in- 
venting an explanation of faith. We are face 
to face with its actuality. This faith of ours 
is as much an evolution as our eyes are, as 
our hands are ; and to-day with us it is not 
the rudimentary thing it once was, just as our 
eyes are not the rudimentary things they were 
once, or our hands the rudimentary things the 
monkeys once had. Eyes and hands and faith 
have all been developed by ages of painful 
use. 

But I hear some one object, and the ob- 
jection seems at first both reasonable and 
weighty : What proof have you that this faith 
— the result of evolution, possessing wonder- 
ful powers of adaptation — has not, like many 
other old things, fulfilled its purpose, become 
no longer useful? Let us consider this a mo- 
ment. There are things within us that are old, 
and have no doubt in the past been adaptable, 



238 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

but, so far as we can see, are useful no longer. 
What distinguishes them ? They are like links 
connecting us to the brutishness of the past. 
They are marks of a lower order. The scien- 
tists call them vestigice, for they are carried 
around by the living body, but are not fulfill- 
ing a living function ; are not vitally import- 
ant to any part of our lives. The proof that 
we can do without them is that we do not use 
them at all, or use them less and less. 

Now faith, I hold, is not one of these. What 
is best and highest and most seemly in our 
lives is ever dependent on the exercise of the 
religious instinct. It would not be hard to 
prove that in every department of progress 
man fortifies and inspires himself by the use 
of this part of himself — the inspirational im- 
pulse toward the best of which he is cogniz- 
ant. Scientific progress and scientific men are 
commonly supposed to have little to do with 
faith (a supposition which, by the way, I think 
is false), but to-day faith has modified the 
whole aspect of science. Contrast the greatest 
scientists the past has produced with the pre- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 239 

sent scientific men. Consider the wisdom of 
Egypt confronting the baffling mysteries of 
the universe. Hear the spirit of the past speak 
in the motto of the Temple of Isis : " I am 
whatever hath been, is, or ever will be, and 
my veil hath no man yet lifted." Now hear 
the later voice : " Veil after veil have we lifted, 
and her face grows more beautiful, august, 
and wonderful, with every barrier withdrawn." 

But let us contrast religion where faith 
dwells and the religion where mere resignation 
takes the place of the hope and inspiration 
that rightly belongs to faith. For let us not 
forget this : Faith is never mere acceptance ; 
it is the appreciation of God that yearns and 
strives and grows from good to better and 
from pure to purer. It is the religious instinct 
in exercise. 

In reading an interesting book lately, the 
tale of a strange life lived in the Far East, — 
Colonel Gardiner's "Memoirs," — I came on 
this story. Gardiner was staying with a moun- 
tain chieftain who held sway over a lonely 
valley on the borders of Thibet. This valley 



240 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

and all its inhabitants were threatened by the 
ruthless incursion of a more powerful chief- 
tain, of whom all the people lived in dread. 
Gardiner's host set himself to procure a pre- 
sent which, when presented to the tyrant, 
would save his people from rapine. An old 
fakir lived in a cave at the mouth of the val- 
ley. For years the old man had lived only to 
pray and to share his scanty provision with 
travellers poorer than himself. He possessed, 
however, an extraordinary ruby, which had 
come to him by direct descent, a family heir- 
loom from the time of the great Timour. Gar- 
diner describes their visit to the old man. 
They found him immersed in contemplation, 
and the chief told the cause of their visit, the 
threatened invasion, the certain ruin to all his 
people, and begged that, in the hope of pro- 
pitiating the tyrant, the old man would give 
to him his one treasure. He listened, said 
Gardiner, and then he arose, went to a corner 
of the hut and unwound the jewel (which, by 
the way, was as safe in his keeping as though 
it had been in the Bank of England, for no 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS] 241 

one in that country would touch the dwelling 
of the fakir), unwound the jewel from a bit 
of rag, and put it in his visitor's hands, say- 
ing, " I hope the gift may have the result you 
expect." Large money was offered, but this 
the old man would not take. " But you may, 
if you will," he said, " give me a larger allow- 
ance of corn, for many hungry people pass 
this way." Then he asked to be left alone, and 
composed himself to prayer again. Here in 
this lonely, distant, unknown land, where no 
Anglo-Saxon had ever come before, was holi- 
ness of a pure type, unworldliness complete 
in its renunciation, charity as unselfish as that 
of the Son of man himself. Yet numberless 
such men have for long centuries sat in their 
caves or huts, looking over the fair plains and 
valleys of those cruel lands. Alas, their holi- 
ness has not availed in those regions to ad- 
vance by an inch, so far as we can see, the 
cause of life, humanity, and truth. Lust and 
cruelty reign supreme. Regions once prosper- 
ous and happy are desert and soaked in blood. 
Man still remains as he has been for centuries, 



242 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

a ravening wild beast. And why? Because 
the progressive power of religion lives in faith 
alone, and not in mere unworldliness. No re- 
nunciation, no unselfish charity, no piety, 
nor all these combined, however splendid they 
are, can, when faith has fled from them, per- 
manently uplift mankind. 

There is no such thing as heredity in good- 
ness. Men are like tops often. The top spins 
a long time after the string that spun it is 
withdrawn, but in time it totters to a fall. So 
hereditary goodness stored up will uphold in- 
dividuals, will for a time even sustain society ; 
but take faith away, and though courage still 
upholds the brave, and fortitude still supports 
the strong of heart, the skies have become gray 
over the pilgrim masses of men, their march- 
ing lines have become broken, and no sweet 
singing cheers the march, no heavenly allies 
help them on their way. Such pilgrims will 
not keep on marching forever, such soldiers 
will soon cease to fight ; for even Mr. Great- 
heart is himself a pilgrim, without hope of a 
celestial city; and Galahad a knight-errant, 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 243 

who dares no longer hope for a glimpse of the 
white light of the Holy Grail. 

But let us see how the Church has dealt 
with faith. First, let us remember it is not the 
policy of the Lord himself to destroy old con- 
ceptions that are part of man's growing. He re- 
places them slowly with better ones. And so his 
new gospel, as it clashed with time-honored be- 
liefs, must merge and mingle with them. Man- 
kind's whole previous conception of God was 
as unlike Jesus Christ as it well could be. 
When the bodily vision of him passed, the 
great doctors and saints of the time soon be- 
gan to create from his teachings, as they un- 
derstood them, systems of religion crude in 
form and profession, differing radically from 
Christ's gospel. It could not be otherwise. 
Man's dominating idea of God has been the 
God of force. Sheer almightiness was exalted, 
— man bidden to bow, — but sheer almighti- 
ness has no sweet reasonableness. It may com- 
mand and threaten, but it ever remains a sort 
of militant rule of life, a martial law for con- 
science; the rigorous control during a crisis, 



244 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

not the normal condition of a peaceful and pro- 
gressive life. But since the mere almighty idea 
of God of necessity died slowly, ere it passed 
there grew from it a whole series of concep- 
tions of a punishing and damning God. Men 
bowed to religious laws as they bowed to na- 
tional laws. The world owed much to the iron 
law of rule, and in the Church, in lesser scale, 
came naturally to be reproduced a similar con- 
dition. It seemed reasonable for men to de- 
mand, in the name of God, obedience, accept- 
ance of certain definite things. They made 
pictures of Jesus that were often veriest cari- 
catures. They baked their truths into hard-and- 
fast shape. Things that appeared to be true 
about Jesus, men were told they must believe ; 
and faith came to be a demand, enforced by 
threat, and not the exercise of an instinct. 

The movement was inevitable. I have re- 
ferred to it before. It was the highest sort of 
religious movement that the time was capable 
of, but none the less it replaced Christ's idea 
of faith with a lesser idea. It practically said 
that faith was not merely the exercise of the 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 245 

religious instinct addressed to its Lord, but 
the enforced belief in a complex system of 
things. I have dwelt on this devolution of 
Christianity just to show that it was a growth 
in the opposite direction to Christ's teaching. 
As I have said, it had to be. The world of 
that day was not capable of evolving or 
accepting anything higher. But the truth put 
in hard-and-fast shape, or in a word, dogmas, 
cannot produce the highest form of Christ's 
likeness. Dogmas are poor food for the soul. 
The Great Physician knew best, and seeing 
far into the future as he did, and knowing 
what must be the deepest needs of the present, 
as well as of future times, he never once made 
a demand on any soul for this lower sort of 
faith. Well he knew that belief in the mere 
almightiness of God only tends to make strong 
natures diabolic ; that repression incites rebel- 
lion. And so, in not one single authentic in- 
cident did he so represent his Father or make 
claim for himself. Recall one instant, if you 
can, where faith, as Jesus demanded it, meant 
believing in things. Always and ever, rather, 



246 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

did faith with him mean belief in the sort of 
God that " I reveal to you " ; " he that hath 
seen me hath seen the Father." 

So much for Christ's demand. How about 
the apostles' demand for faith. What did they 
mean, for example, by faith as a prerequisite 
to baptism ? What was baptism? Was it more 
than a common rite to which was given a new 
significance, an open confession in the sight 
of men of obedience to Jesus, a declaration 
that he was the Son of God ; that his cause 
was the one to fight for ; his society the divine 
and final society ? Those who would be his fol- 
lowers must be baptized. What was the form 
of baptism ? We know that baptism at first 
was not administered in any other form but 
the name of Jesns. The very early Christ- 
ians were not even baptized in the name of 
the Trinity. This was a later form. Belief in 
Jesus was the one thing demanded, and that 
without any disquisition on the nature of God 
at all. 

There is not one single line in all St. Paul's 
thirteen letters to lead us to suppose that he 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 247 

laid any stress, with the multitude of his con- 
verts, on mysterious questions of religious 
truth ; whether, for instance, Jesus was the son 
of Mary alone, or the son of Mary and Joseph. 
The subject does not come up with St. Paul. 
Nor is there one line to lead us to suppose he 
formulated for his converts any doctrine of 
the Trinity. Rather, Paul said, as his Master 
had said before him, " Jesus stands before you 
— do you admire him, can you love him, can 
you find it in your hearts to obey him? I 
speak to you as the apostle, the messenger to 
a despairing world of the visible God in hu- 
manity. Here at last is rest, pardon, and hope 
for men." 

But this is not what men are asked to do 
to-day. They are confronted with, or think 
they are confronted with, certain churchly de- 
mands. They must stand up to say a creed, 
and they are told that that creed is not sim- 
ply a symbol of their faith, but an accurate 
definition of things which they believe to be 
utterly beyond human defining. Or, second, 
they must submit to the rite of baptism. But 



248 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

baptism does not seem to them to be quite what 
the old rite was. Once it meant danger braved, 
and now, too often, they see it degraded till 
it is merely a fashionable function. And the 
third demand is that they should kneel at the 
communion table, where again " believing 
things " confronts them. They have some dim 
idea of what it meant to kneel with the Lord 
of long ago, when the multitude clamored for 
him and were plotting his death ; to kneel 
around the altars of the early Church when 
heathen Kome thundered and the Arena 
reeked of blood. But what does this mean to- 
day ? They are told it expresses a sorrow for 
sin which they cannot always honestly call 
forth. 

I might go further, but time forbids me. 
Here these three simple acts, these demands 
of the Church, are each and all of them made 
to rest on a false idea of faith. They are not 
made the expression of personal obedience and 
reverence for Jesus. They have been perverted 
from that. And can we not see that the nat- 
ural man, the inferior man, often likes this 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 249 

system of perversion, that he will readily com- 
ply with these things? Cannot any one see 
that he does this because he is a lesser man ? 
The more scrupulous men, however, — the 
men built to a higher order, whose religion 
does not mean a bargaining with God, but an 
effort to follow God in honesty of soul, — 
these greater, larger men cannot accept such 
conditions, but ever draw back from them. 
They do so, not captiously, but in order that 
they may safeguard the very eye of the soul, 
the religious instinct itself. A faith in things 
suits the natural man, alas, too well. He is 
ever its defender. But it leaves uncomforted 
and unblest men of larger mould. 

So, based on this misapprehension of the 
meaning of faith, there has grown up a false 
idea of the Church. From the Church men 
turn away, for she seems to come to them with 
intolerable demands. She makes them sus- 
pect God, not love him. She seems an exact- 
ing Church, not a giving and freeing Church, 
as of old she came in beauty and might to 
men. The best and most scrupulous men hold 



250 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

back from her too often, doubtful of that to 
which they are asked to commit themselves. 
Could they but realize that religious faith is 
only a striving after obedience to Jesus, the 
simple, great Jesus Christ of the Gospels ; seek- 
ing to do what he would have us do to make 
earth more fit for his divine rule, slowly to 
lift life's laws into harmony with love's law! 
Let the Church demand these things of men, 
and again will men listen to her, and again 
will she lead them on in the path of a high 
resolve. And though they stagger, painfully 
at times, yet will they follow her, for follow- 
ing her will then be following the Son of 
man. 

Faith, then, as Jesus and also his apostles 
demanded its exercise, was not believing things 
that were hard to believe. It was using a di- 
vinely implanted instinct, a power and a fac- 
ulty within us that answers to the presentation 
of the living, loving God made visible in Jesus 
Christ. When this faith has failed to fasten its 
grasp on him, again and again it has created 
for itself distorted images, again and again it 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 251 

has found itself disastrously following wan- 
dering fires ; but still it ever contains within 
itself power to turn to the true vision and 
bow before the supreme beauty, perceiving 
the beautiful to be beautiful and the good to 
be good, and, therefore, sent from God. From 
this the Christian Church started, and to this 
the Christian Church must return. This is the 
real Church. This is the real Christianity. 
This is the Christianity that shook the old 
world and lifted it out of its despair. This is 
the Christianity that can breathe peace into 
the deep unrestfulness of our times. It shows 
no defect of nature to refuse to believe in old 
things just because they are old. Tradition, 
however venerable and weighty, may be rooted 
in utter error. It has often been proved to be 
so rooted. To find one's self, therefore, in- 
capable of accepting truths accredited by most 
venerable tradition shows no defect of nature. 
I repeat ; to refuse to believe things is no sin ; 
but to refuse Jesus the faith he demands — 
ah, what shall w r e say of that? 

We are told men take a mass of precious 



252 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

stuff, and, subjecting it to intolerable heat, 
expect at last to see glowing in its centre one 
tiny, blood-red drop — the ruby. So in Jesus 
there is for man the declaration of his own 
preciousness. The ages of human struggle have 
not been in vain. The chaos that often seemed 
to engulf man's life was only the prelude to 
God's cosmos. All the pains and all the strug- 
gles and all the hopes of the mothers and 
fathers of the world were justified when at 
last, as the result of all the intolerable heat 
and pain of living, there came forth One ut- 
terly beautiful, completely good, and men 
bowed before him and cried, " Behold the Son 
of God." 

More than once before on earth had burst 
forth that ecstatic cry. But when at last his 
own lips speak, we hear him say, " The Son 
of man" To fail to see in him a present beauty, 
a visible loveliness ; to fail to hear and own 
the sway and inspiration of his heavenly music 
— this, indeed, is to argue defect and limita- 
tion ; for such failure means, in part at least, 
a moral death. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 253 

Press faith on men, emphasize it as believ- 
ing things, and you have but erected thorny- 
hedges around the cross of the Christ through 
which men must peep, over which, wounded, 
they must strain, and after all only see partial 
views and catch distorted outlines of him whom 
you would place within. This has been done 
again and again ; done with the best intention, 
done by those possessed of a passionate love 
for him whom they would protect. But the 
human hedges, whether erected by friends or 
foes, with spiny barrier forbid the child-faith 
he so loved to come near him. 

I would not be misunderstood. Creeds are 
necessary, dogmas in their place essential. I 
have said nothing to decry them. Many dog- 
mas and doctrines have been slowly evolved, 
and are the result of much pain, of long and 
reverent study, and show a profound insight 
into human needs and divine revelation. Thus 
thoughtfully, reverently, let us receive these 
partial statements of eternal truth, till the 
Master open our minds for better and higher 
things still. Thoughtful men will readily admit 



254 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

that we must have creed in every active rela- 
tion of life. The merchant has a creed in his 
office ; the scientist one in his laboratory ; the 
bricklayer and builder one at his fingers' ends; 
and the soldier who charges and dies does so 
because he accepts and obeys the soldier's 
creed. The creed is a certain accepted thing 
on which I, as a man, base my action. The 
creed is a working necessity at all times. In 
every department of life, as much as in the 
religious department, "no creed" means pa- 
ralysis. 

And still further, I must hold my creed with 
other men, and make it a basis of working 
with other men. The individualist simply ar- 
gues himself a fool when he says : " I must 
unite with other men to make money, unite to 
get learning, unite to produce any valuable 
earthly work, or unite to defend anything that 
is worth defending. But when it comes to a 
question of doing good and developing my 
own character, let me alone. Here I will be my 
own guide. Here no man shall dictate to me, 
aid me, or judge me." He may be perfectly 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 255 

intelligent, may have thought intelligently 
along other lines, but along the spiritual line 
he is not a thinker : he is talking foolishly. 

But what to-day is most important to em- 
phasize surely is this : all these doctrines, dog- 
mas, and creeds, however necessary they may 
be, are but crutches and walking-sticks, not 
hands and feet. They are but a temporary ex- 
pression of the eternal verity, and as they 
change and pass, by their very change are evi- 
dencing the might of the living truth which, 
because it is the everlasting seed, can ever, 
must ever, reclothe itself in a series of new 
and beautiful bodies, thus protecting its life. 

Shortly before he died Tennyson said, " My 
most passionate desire is to obtain a clearer 
and fuller view of God." So spoke and still 
speak the great of the earth. For man cannot 
live by bread alone. And if we have learned 
in our heart of hearts to want Jesus, nay, if 
we have never heard his name and yet have 
sought the things he strove for, then some 
glorious day he will surely open our eyes to 
see the things we cannot see now. The way 



256 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

shall be open for us, and the lame man shall 
leap as the hart, and the tongue of the dumb 
shall sing. The little lame boy needs his crutch 
as he limps beside his father ; but when they 
both of them come to the stream-side, his father 
takes him in his arms and he needs his crutches 
no more. 

Let me beg, then, your careful considera- 
tion for the meaning of faith. I insist on it as 
of vital importance to-day. Oh, let us search 
our hearts so that we may keep alive and in 
health this divinely appreciative part of us. 
Are we making provision for this part of our 
life itself? It is ever the eye of the soul; and 
all the spicery of all the Indies, all the glut of 
all the seas cannot take its place, cannot satisfy 
the soul from which faith is departing. 

Be you inside the Church or outside the 
Church, I charge you, then, make provision 
for this faith that is in you, this religious fac- 
ulty God has given you, which you hold by 
virtue of the painful struggles of the past, and 
for the handing down of which to your child- 
ren you will be held accountable by God. 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 257 

Keep the religious instinct alight. Keep single 
this divine part. For in each soul of man it is 
the little window opening to the Everlasting 
Day. It is because this wonderful religious in- 
stinct and aspiration within us links us to 
God that faith, and faith only, can transform. 
By faith's use it is absolutely true that we are 
transformed men. Faith softens us, widens us, 
deepens our sympathy. It breathes a peace 
over all life. Why, take it in the lower sphere. 
You trust a friend of great resources — you 
who are poor and friendless and burdened 
with a load you cannot carry. You go to your 
friend, you lay your case before him. He 
meets you with kindly hand and eye, and be- 
fore you know it your burden is rolling from 
your shoulders, and you go away from his 
house or his office with lighter tread and hope 
reborn. Or you trust in some one you love — 
your friend, your child — and in the strength 
of that trust, no matter how fierce the sun or 
how cruel the cold and frost, you find warmth 
and shelter. What accomplishes the wonder ? 
It is just faith ; faith in what is highest and 



258 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

best in those you know down here. And so 
you go forth to life's inevitable struggles with 
a gentler heart. Faith justifies all it does and 
sees here by what it believes in beyond. Faith 
is intuition triumphing over appearances, " the 
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of 
things not seen." Put trust in God, the Good 
over all, the Worker in all, the Power behind 
all, and at last the Judge of all — not the out- 
side and distant God, but the immanent and 
inside God, moving through all men. When 
we reach this point, my friends, we hear an 
echo of divine harmony, and we know the be- 
ginnings of a holy peace. 

We know in part — how, then, can we 
Make plain each heavenly mystery? 
Yet still the Almighty understands 
Our human hearts, our human hands, 
And, overarching all our creeds, 
Gives his wide presence to our needs. 

And now I turn specially to you young men 
and women who to-day go forth from this 
great university into the larger life beyond. 
Oh, still it is true, true to-day as it was eigh- 
teen hundred years ago — " all things are pos- 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 259 

sible to him that believeth." Believe in your 
friends, believe in your country, in your in- 
stitutions, in yourself, in your God. Believe 
in your dreams, your best and highest and 
holiest dreams. Many things you may have to 
give up, but never surrender these. Use the 
belief you have, and it will surely grow to 
more. 

Especially, and above all, fix and concen- 
trate your belief on Jesus, on the value of the 
things he declared valuable ; on the sort of 
God he believed in, a God like himself. You 
are ever choosing things to believe in. You 
can and do " will to belie ve." Will to believe 
in him, and in his Father God. His person and 
his message have been presented to humanity 
as a supernatural revelation that demands man's 
reverend obedience because of this very su- 
per naturalness. I have tried to commend his 
gospel to you on far other grounds. 

Neither in the personality of Jesus nor yet 
in his teachings is there any break in the order 
of the world, which he declared to be a divine 
order. He was a Jew; he inherited Jewish 



260 THE REASONABLENESS OF 

teaching and tradition, a teaching and tradi- 
tion that gave to our sorrowing world the only 
God it can ever worship, a God who cares. 

We can all love the beautiful, we can all 
praise the strong, but in humanity there is 
much that is sordid and mean and small and 
of little account, and a real God must be the 
God over all, loving all, caring for all, responsi- 
ble for all. Humanity, in the mass, can never 
and never will worship any God whose tender 
mercies are not over all his works. 

Such a God Jesus brought to men. Art 
never dreamed of such a God till after Jesus 
died. Science knows him not to-day. Science 
has never found him. Some day it may find 
him, but not now. But the hungry heart of 
man is a wonderful thing. It dreams great 
dreams, ever and anon it sees high visions. 

Jesus will yet rule the world because he em- 
bodies the beliefs and hopes of the world. He 
is the product of our order. His doctrines are 
but the setting forth of the long-cherished in- 
stincts of men. He is our King because he is 
one of ourselves; no miraculous visitor from 



THE RELIGION OF JESUS 261 

another world, but a man, bone of our bone, 
flesh of our flesh. In him the hopes and 
prayers and beliefs of the dumb millions at 
last take voice. 

We Christians believe, since the Incarnation 
of Jesus, since to us was born a man full of 
the Holy Ghost, a brighter light, a clearer vi- 
sion of God has been given men. Those who 
try to follow him, who take him as a master, 
and seek to do the deeds he would have them 
do, have light given them to live and hope and 
work by. They need no oracular authority. 
He appointed none. At the same time they 
refuse to cut themselves off from the reli- 
gious world of the past. He did so refuse. 
He knew he was what he was because of it; 
slowly we are realizing this too. In the heart 
of man, long before Jesus' day, was born the 
beginning of the great gospel, God's nature 
present in human life. This is the supreme 
miracle, if you will. Man's life ever moving 
upward to greater, higher ends, by process of 
natural law, by exercise of instinctive vision, 
or, to use old words, by inspiration of the 



262 THE REASONABLENESS OF RELIGION 

Holy Ghost. This is the gospel of good news 
to men, gloriously reasonable, yet surpassing 
all reason. And he who brought it long ago, 
still in beauty and holiness and power to help, 
stands alone. He transcends all teachers. He 
still inspires and sustains the hopes of men. 



THE END 



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